Overview

Snak is a program that will let you participate in discussions in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. IRC channels are like meeting rooms on the Internet, where people from all over the world can meet and chat.

There are thousands of channels, each focused on a location or subject, so it's easy to find a place where something interesting is being discussed. You can find channels for computer related topics, your favorite sci-fi tv show, sports like soccer or ice hockey, current politics, local events in boston or kenya and everything in between.

In addition to chats in the meeting rooms, you can also have private, real-time talks with friends, family or business associates.

IRC consists of many different networks, most of which have servers (dedicated computers) all over the world accessible through the Internet. Individuals use Snak to connect to a particular IRC network via a server. The largest of the IRC networks have as many as 100.000 participants and it is estimated that at any given time there is nearly a million people using IRC across the various networks.

The dominant population of IRC changes in a daily cycle, from European, to American, to Australian, to Asian, and back to European, as the day progresses. Because IRC is worldwide it can be a good way to hone your skills in Swedish or French or any other language that interests you. Chances are you can find it on IRC.

Snak is distributed as shareware, which means that it may be used freely and evaluated for 30 days at no charge. Unlimited usage requires a license key which is $29 for a single user.

After the 30-day evaluation period has ended the program will quit after 15 minutes of use if a licence is not purchased. Buying it will of course remove this limitation.

System requirements

Snak requires OS X 10.2 or newer.

Installing Snak

Snak is distributed as a single file, called Snak.dmg which contains the program and all its support files in compressed form. Double click on the dmg file to open it. A disk appears on your desktop which can be opened. Simply copy the Snak application to your application folder and run it.

The "Enable ident" folder can be disregarded unless it becomes necessary to install the Ident service. There is more information on this subject in the troubleshooting section.

Snak will make a folder in the Application Support folder, which is found in the Library folder. This is where it stores, among other things, the many sample scripts that can be explored and used.

What’s new

This release features extensive changes to the interface and improved networking code. Snak is now OS X only.

The Snak windows will normally contain multiple panels, where a panel can be a list like the action or profile list, or it can be a text panel like a channel. As before the windows can either stack (one panel visible) or tile the panels (all panels visible). The tiled view has been significantly improved, and now the panels resize dynamically when the topic bar is dragged. The panels can collapse so that only the topic area is visible. The stacked view uses a button bar to switch between panels, and this bar can be placed either above or below the panels. In both stacked and tiled view, the panels can be dragged between windows by grabbing the title bar. The windows provide live feedback of the insertion location and size of the dragged panel.

The nick column in the panels can be resized by dragging the divider between the nick column and the text area. The nicknames in the column can now be colorized for better distinction between the channel members.

The lists are now panels like the channels, consoles, queries, DCC chats and filters. This means that they can be enbedded in the same windows as the channels and thus reduce the number of windows on the screen. DCC file transfers are also panels so it is now possible to have a window listing all the downloads. The DCC panel stay open after the completion of the transfer until it is closed manually. A downloaded file can be opened directly from the DCC panel.

The profile list is expanded to display all the channels associated with the connections. The channels can be joined directly with a doubleclick on the channel name. The list also incorporates active and completed DCC transfers in a separate item.

Log files can now be saved as HTML 4 with a customizable stylesheet. This makes it easier to post an IRC log to the web.

The network code is now fully optimized for multoprocessor machines. The performance is increased and the sporadic crashes on very fast transfers are fixed. Connections to the network main servers, which distribute connections to other servers, works. The ability to connect to IPv6 enabled servers has also been added.

The preferences have been reorganized and simplified. You can now define a complete color theme and assign it on a per-panel basis. A color theme consist's of a background color and compatible nick and message colors. There is a separate panel to select the colors used in the user list, including colors for super and half-ops (channel operators with more or less privileges than the regular operators)

The scripting interface has been revised and updated with additional functionality. The included scripts, like PurePak and the TriviaBot have been updated and expanded.

The Script and Sound folders have been moved to the Application Support folder in the Library folder so that changes to these folders are not lost every time Snak is upgraded.

Please look at the version history for the full list of changes and improvements.