jmIrc - IRC MIDlet for mobile phones

jmIrc is a J2ME MIDlet allowing ie. cell phone owners to use IRC wirelessly. It should work on any device supporting MIDP 1.0 and also supports connecting through HTTP proxy server on phones that don't support the Java socket API.

This project started as a fork of Sverre Valskrå's WLIrc but eventually led to be a complete rewrite project. Its aim is to be as small and lightweight as possible still trying to maintain the ease of use and all needed features. At the same time it tries to be some kind of hybrid implementing all the most useful features from other clients.

Some features

News 2019-05-31

Nine years have passed since the last update, and BlackBerry devices (and most other j2me devices) are pretty much dead by now. I decided to remove all BlackBerry specific code from jmIrc repository and keep it pure MIDP-1.0 for historical purposes. I also released all the other unreleased changes as jmIrc 0.97 and it is live starting from today, go crazy with it! The repository is now moved from svn to git and there are instructions to set up the development environment in case I need to do more changes in the future. I have considered buying the new Nokia 3310 3G model which should be able to run jmIrc, but I'm not sure until I see it. Thank you for all the users and special thanks to the nice people at DALnet who have kept #jmIrcHelp running all these years! Over and out.

News 2010-02-16

Those who own a BlackBerry device, I recommend to check out the beta version of jmIrc at http://jmirc.sf.net/beta/jmIrc.jad which has some BlackBerry specific options. For example you should be now able to connect through WiFi or BES/MDS from the advanced settings. Reportedly also users that need a BIS connection might have better connectivity with the new BlackBerry connection mode. I hope this will help those users who have had connection problems before. Also if you want to support jmIrc development, please consider donating!

News 2010-01-26

It's now exactly 3 years and 4 months since the last news entry, and I'm here to tell that jmIrc is not abandoned completely. You might have not noticed, but the jmIrc version 0.96 was released in November 2009 and included some small bugfixes. The mentioned Hebrew codepage is included and there is also a /nickserv command that works on DALnet, because they changed the default nickserv to include the complete host and it's difficult to write everytime. I'm sorry for so few updates on jmIrc, but I'm still using it myself and it does everything I want it to do, so there hasn't been much need for updates from my part. If you have some important problems or features you would want to discuss, you could send message to my @users.sourceforge.net email. The name is juhovh as can probably be seen from jmIrc main screen, I also use the same nick on IRCnet, freenode and occasionally DALnet when I remember to log in there. Thank you for your support!

News 2006-09-26

Just to let you know what's happening on the jmIrc front now that I have had some time to check some changes again. Mostly I have discussed about adding native support for Hebrew language and Windows 1255 codepage. The results look quite good at least with SonyEricsson P910 phone as can be seen from the screenshots section. Please test the CVS version of jmIrc if you like as well, a beta version should be always present at address http://jmirc.sf.net/beta/jmIrc.jad and this is going to be the 0.96 version when it gets into that state (most probably during this year). The releases of jmIrc are not very frequent any more since it mostly does what I originally wanted it to do and I don't want to break things too much. Nothing else to say now, carry on.

News 2006-08-29

Some people have asked me about a new BBirc program that costs 9-10 USD, is sold to BlackBerry devices and looks almost exactly like jmIrc. This BBirc (link omitted since this is not an advertisement) is indeed a program derived from jmIrc and therefore under GPL license. The company S4BB Ltd. sells binaries of it and provides customer support when needed. They have sent me the source code with their changes and there is no license violation here, although I have requested them to add some attribution that it is derived from jmIrc just in the name of good will and manners. I will try to make sure that jmIrc is free of charge and have same feature set as BBirc in the future as well, so those of you who don't need support and want to get a free as in freedom and free as in beer client can continue to use jmIrc just like before with no loss.

News 2006-04-23

There are again some new phone models and screenshots updated to this website. The Siemens bug of jmIrc disconnecting after half minutes idle time was confirmed by Tomáš Janoušek and he even wrote to official customer supp about it. They were not very enthusiastic about fixing it and suggested just sending useless messages every half minutes because it's not that expensive after all. But now that we have a confirmation and more information about this issue it might be addressed in next jmIrc. And there are already quite much changes in the CVS so check that out if you're interested in fiddling the latest version. (support for larger fonts, refactoring of configuration screens, support for ban in names list, highlighting case insensitive, invites work and some other bugfixes)

News 2006-01-01

Happy new year 2006 everyone! To celebrate this year I've released jmIrc 0.95 for you all. My original plan was to not add new features after 0.90 but now many channels are transitioning to UTF-8 partly because of irssi 0.8.10 so the new version has native UTF-8 support with fallback charset. Also the bug that caused all CTCP messages fail is fixed now. Enjoy! From release notes: Fix several small bugs in earlier versions and the CTCP bug introduced in 0.94 version. Handle UTF-8 with some fallback charset in irssi 0.8.10 style and add native UTF-8 support for phones that don't handle it although it's in j2me specs. Some crash fixes which happened when kicked of parted in Status-window.

Update: As jmIrc releases are not so frequent and sometimes it may take quite long time until smaller bugfixes get out, I set up a CVS repository that should include always the latest working version which you can build. Instructions added to the download page.

News 2005-12-06

It's now the independence day of Finland and all the shops and places are closed because of that. So I finally have some time to do on my projects! jmIrc 0.94 had a nasty bug that broke all incoming CTCP messages. Also most phones these days support inputting multiple lines on phone, in this case only the first line was sent before. I fixed these both and some smaller issues last weekend and they are almost ready to be released as 0.95, just need a little bit of testing.

I was also bored enough to do some googling about jmIrc and was happy (and little scared) to notice how widely it has spread. First of all it is included in the Pocket PC IRC application comparison and got for example best grade of its mIRC colour support. This is very nice since I never originally even thought that this could be run on Pocket PC as a respectable client.

In another comparison I found that jmIrc got selected as the best IRC client available for Nokia high end 9500 communicator model, VERY surprising for me, I've barely seen this device not even mention testing on it. Last surprise was that someone has made a Japanese jmIrc fork with native JIS/SJIS en/decoding and kanji input support! Quite unbelievable, and I never knew anything! I have to put up some web page to link to these, all I could ask more is for people to let me know about this kind of projects, reviewing or forking. Otherwise just keep up the good work and the 0.95 will come quite soon, it's a promise.

News 2005-10-19

New version of jmIrc released, versioned as 0.94. This has just small changes and bugfixes that shouldn't be critical but help many people. I would like some BlackBerry people to test this version because I used another computer to build it. From release notes: This release has been on my hard drive for ages, I have no version control system on jmIrc at the moment and my j2me emulator is broken for some unknown reason and everything sucks etc. However I will make this release hoping I could get a fresh start. Main difference is that autojoin channels are separated with a comma instead of space so you can add channels that have keys. Also now you can add several highlight keywords separated with a space. Anyway, good luck.

News 2005-09-26

Just want to let you know, HttpIrcProxy 0.36 had some problems with several free virtual machines and also possibly older 1.4 virtual machines of Sun Microsystems. So 0.37 is now out to hopefully fix those, so if you don't have any problems now you won't need this update. The rest of you, enjoy.

News 2005-09-03

We're really dead now! No, not really, there haven't been a release for half a year now and the biggest reason has been that I'm too afraid to change anything since it works ok in most cases and I'm tired of fighting with mobile phone firmware bugs. (seriously) Another reason is that after purchasing a laptop I have reduced my own mobile phone ircing although I still do it from time to time. There has been a lot of feedback and I should consider it on the next version. Also I will compile 0.94 with some other building system since current one has well known problems with BlackBerries. Because of Ilya Volynets's work I can even promise .cod files for BlackBerry users when I just get it done.

Oh, and I updated the supported devices and screenshots a bit, thanks for reporters. I've also got some reports that on newer Motorola firmwares only Motorola signed midlets can get access to socket API and all others need to use HTTP proxy. If this is true it really sucks and is a good enough reason to boycott Motorola. I'm waiting for updates.