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Hack 89 IRC from a Pocket PC
If you're constantly on themove, whether it be roaming around your home or trekking in the
mountains, IRC is only a few taps away on your Pocket PC.Owners
of Pocket PCs are not left in the dark when
it comes to IRC connectivity. Pocket IRC (http://www.pocketirc.com) is a great little
IRC client that lets you use IRC from your handheld device. It is
available for free download, and you currently can register your
trial version for $14.95.There are a variety of methods for connecting to an IRC server from
your Pocket PC. The simplest is to plug it into its docking station
and piggyback your computer's Internet connection.
This does seem rather limiting, as you are unable to wander around
with your Pocket PC. But nonetheless, this can still be quite useful,
as you can use your Pocket PC to keep an eye on IRC while
you're playing a full-screen game on your computer.As you get more adventurous, you can start moving away from your
computer. Most Pocket PCs will allow you to connect to a remote
device via
infrared or Bluetooth. If you have a
suitable receiver plugged into your computer, you can use it to gain
a bit of IRC freedom as you wander around your office or part of your
home.Going one step further, you can even use the infrared or Bluetooth to
get your mobile phone to establish
a dialup or GPRS connection to the Internet. This will let you use
IRC from anywhere you can receive a signal on your phone: on the bus,
on the train, even while walking home if you have a steady pair of
hands!An even better solution is to use something like the
O2 XDA II, which is essentially a
full-fledged Pocket PC with a built-in mobile phone. With just one
device, you can access IRC from anywhere. See it in action in Figure 14-2.
Figure 14-2. Accessing IRC from an O2 XDA II with Pocket IRC
provides a convenient and usable way of interacting with IRC on a
Pocket PC. When you start using it, you will immediately notice that
it has been designed to save on the amount of typing you have to do.
For example, instead of typing /join
#foo, you can join the channel just by
typing #foo and then tapping IRC
Server Join....In fact, all/command commands
have been removed and replaced by either a single tap or a
tap-and-hold to bring up a menu. It takes only a few minutes to get
used to this new style of input, but it is worth it in the long run,
as typing on a Pocket PC without a keyboard is not the fastest thing
in the world. If you want to type a word that is already visible in
the large text area, you simply have to tap that word, and it will be
automagically entered into the input box for you.To save screen space, the input box is embedded directly into the
standard menu bar at the bottom of the display. Pocket IRC even gives
you a full-screen option, which removes the navigation bar from the
top of the display.If you need to fit even more text on the display, you can delve into
the vast number of options provided by Pocket IRC, as shown in Figure 14-3. Lowering the font size will help out here,
but making it too small will obviously make it unreadable.
Figure 14-3. Changing the font face, size, and colors
takes just two taps (IRC
Connect), but first, you mustvisit the Server tab in the Options section and tell it which server
you want to connect to, as shown in Figure 14-4.
Notice that the server has been set to localhost
so it can use an SSH tunnel to
connect to a private IRC server (see [Hack #27] ), but you can also
connect directly to a public IRC network such as irc.freenode.net.
Figure 14-4. Telling Pocket IRC which server to connect to
response, you can go back into Options and enable the Ident server
from the Ident tab. You can tell it to use whatever username you
want. Another nice feature is that Pocket IRC even lets you send and
receive files over DCC, so if you're stuck on the
train and suddenly realize you've forgotten an
important file, you can hop onto IRC and ask your colleagues if they
can send it to you.
