Good design, still a bit lacking, and SLOOOOW

This Update:
The new Chat Filter feature is (or could be) great. It has such future potential, but as the documentation example shows, it is limited to certain areas at this point. Hopefully, if it were also able to respond to join/part (joined and left channel) messages (ideally with user info also avaialeble to the filter), had things like time/timer triggers, could add to the ignore list, etc, then this could become a really powerful feature of Textual. Doing things like notifying when users in your area (based on ISP) join, automatically setting spam bots to ignore, warning and handling various things when certain users join, etc, etc would be nice, but as it is now, none of those are possible. I’m hoping this new feature will be made even more versatile.

In General:
Almost my fav IRC client for Mac. The number of bugs have decreased, but there are still a fair number of minor but also obvious and annoying ones. There are also still a lot of basic features missing from what is almost a full feature IRC client, mainly in the area of managing an address (nickname) book with notes, actions, highlight, highlight on list, track/ignore, etc. As it is now, it is even difficult to simply ignore users (you can ignore, but if you want to do it by nickname, which I’d say is the most common way, you have to go through multiple menus and know how to enter a complicated mask; even light clients typically have a right-click on nickname and choose-ignore feature. Other bugs/inconsistancies related to the way /ignore is handled, a pretty significant thing, and ones related to current room names loosing highlight, popup info sticking, etc. Also things like styles not updating properly, and other significant but not often used things not working right.

But one of the biggest drawbacks, that started in version 5, is that it uses unexplainable amounts of CPU power, often going over 100% for extended periods (100% = one of multiple CPUs). Still the same in this update (and the last). Scrolling chats has become painful, hesitating, lagging, jumping, and being almost non-interactive, and very sloooow, unpleasant and frustrating. That problem didn’t exist before version 5; however, it is also possible it is due to the style (since I had to change to equinox which I now love the look of).

Lots of little bugs, mostly annoying leaving an unpolished/unprofessional feel to it in some ways, but the core is solid and it basically works. The CPU issue really needs to be looked into, this program clearly hasn’t been profiled/analyzed and made to run effeciently or well, and that may be a large part of the scrolling problem (or not). The scrolling is at the point of a deal breaker, even on new empty chats with no pics it hesitates to start scrolling but otherwise works with only a little jitter, but use it for a few hours, with only a few channels active, with a limited amount of pics displayed, and it’s horrible. It’s just simple scrolling, it should be instant, smooth, and not bring a powerful computer to a crawl. There is a lot of potential in this software; hopefully it can get that extra polish and tuning.

MasterCMD about Textual 6, v5.2.3