HLSniper

"The latest news on mIRC"

mIRC 6.2 has been released! (July 28th 2006)

Of course this new version addresses the buggies and most of the other comments and remarks we received after the previous release. Apart from that Khaled spend lots of time on the UTF-8 support that was added in the previous version. As you might know UTF-8 is a font encoding system that allows you to use fonts with strange, international characters. That of course helps a lot if you want to chat in your own language! mIRC's default toolbar is now customizable through a /toolbar command. You can add, move and delete buttons, add your own icons, and of course, attach your own commands to them.

By popular demand also a treebar has been added. This lists network connections with channels, queries and other open windows, much like the switchbar. It behaves like the switchbar in many ways as well. You can expand and collapse trees, just like you would expect. Right-clicking on an item pops up the usual menu for that window. Right-clicking in an empty area of the treebar pops up a menu with various display options. The treebar width can be set by dragging the border with the mouse, and jsut as with virtually all other windows the background and text colors can be set in the colors dialog. Just like the toolbar the treebar can be repositioned to the top/bottom/left/right of the main mIRC window!

In this version several UTF-8 related bugs are fixed, including bugs with text wrapping and copy/pasting from UTF-8 "display" or "encode" enabled windows, and bugs relating to the order in which SJIS/JIS and UTF-8 encodings are applied. Much more important is that UTF-8 support has been greatly enhanced in this version of mIRC to allow people all over the world to chat in their own languages, with their own fonts, with a lot less hassle then ever before. To do so support for font substitution/font linking has been added. This allows mIRC to display all characters needed, regardless of the font you are using, assuming you have the required fonts on your system, somewhere. mIRC will try to match font sizes etc. To speed up the process Khaled has implemented his own caching routines to enable fast font/character referencing.

Various other changes include:

better support of XP and classic themes, faster re-wrapping of text, a fix for various $regsubex() and $regsub() parsing bugs, for a flood protection bug, some agent speech bug, and for a bug with the find dialog in desktop windows, and mIRC now stores servers that were connected to successfully to prioritize future server connection attempts, ...and a lot more.