xconvers (http://xconvers.sourceforge.net) by Joop Stakenborg <pa4tu@amsat.org> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Xconvers is a client for convers, a IRC-like conversation system for hamradio operators. Convers differs from IRC because there is a much smaller command set and command input and output is generally shorter. This is done because a lot of convers servers are linked by radio waves, where traffic should be kept low. This program originally started as a motif application, which I started maintaining when Guido Vattrodt, the original author, dropped it. The work I have done on the old version involved small additions and bugfixes. The last available motif version was 0.4.2. I wanted to enhance xconvers, but found motif programming hard. Good books and tutorials are hard to find and the code looked too complicated to me. Then I came across GTK, the Gimp Toolkit. This library has good documentation and its widgets look good. Programming in GTK proved to be a lot easier. The really hard part I had to understand was socket programming. I soon discovered that porting xconvers to GTK would be too difficult, so I decided to write it from scratch. After finding out about glade (http://glade.pn.org), a user interface builder for GTK, designing the UI proved to be rather easy! Please have a look at the xconvers homepage at http://xconvers.sourceforge.net, where you can find new versions of xconvers and support pages. There is bug tracking system where you can report bugs. Thanks for all the people who have tested this software. I hang around on channel 44 on the worldwide convers sometimes.
