I am not talking about the Christmas pickle. Even though it does fit the description pretty well. No, I am writing about an update!
It may or may not be overdue. It is in any case and regardless of whether you choose it to be late or not, great news.
Our little elves in Santa’s workshop have been put to labor over the past few months and let me tell you they sweat more than salty water in the process. So, what have they slaved over this long? Well, long bloody (there I said it) story short: an update for Linkinus.

I guess what you really want to know about (fact aside that there is an update) is what this update will bring to you on its sleigh:

• Greatly improved overall performance and CPU usage:
  Greatly is an understatement at its best. Speed and responsiveness have increased by several orders of magnitude!
• Multi-line input field:
  Requested long ago, finally implemented. Note this only works if you have enough vertical space beneath the application window.
• Channel listing up to 20 times more responsive
• Better support for /who and /names
• Revamped IRC identities – set them up the Preferences:
  One place to set them all, one place to find them, one place to bring them all and in the preferences bind them
• Updated Styles:
  This includes new embed features for e.g. Whisper (instragr.am and cloudapp). Also the evergreen Simplified is going through rejuvenation!
• Improved support for systemwide SOCKS proxy
• Added UPnP support for file transfers
• Fixed issues with PCRE regular expression supports in Highlights:
  You can now fully enjoy being highlighted all across IRC because your malformed regular expression finally works as expected!
• Fixed an issue where Filters wouldn’t stick across sessions, not to mention that we decided to take pity on the poor souls who wanted to add new filters and henceforth provide an appropriate button for precisely this
• Fixed IRC Quit messages
• Fixed an issue where the main window would be blank on first launch
• Added shortcut to clear all queries
• Improved contextual menus relevance
• Added an option to hide the ‘Groups’ button in the title bar
• Improved SSL support
• Faster processing of bouncers backscroll
• Fixed a bug preventing users from removing certain channels or queries (‘phantom channels’)
• Improved ‘/msg nick’ with no content
• Allowed the main window to resize to a smaller size
• Greatly improved DCC support
• Now up to 1000 (that’s a thousand for those that can’t read Arabic numbers) lines of backlog per channel
• Updated SysInfo plugin
• MOAR, specifically, more options for queries and channels, including Growl/sound muting
  Please note that “rejoin on kick” and “automatically join on connect” have been moved from their global settings to the respective channel inspectors
• /mark … mark my words (slow clap) here comes a command you can use to add a marker to the current channel
• /delay (a new plugin) that enables you to delay execution of commands e.g. when chaining them in the alias section

Changed on the 27th of December and later

• ‘Join on kick’ is now disabled on new channels by default
• Fixed minor log viewer issues
• Fixed a bug where the ‘Linkinus 2 Logs’ folder would be created even when logging was off

The beta is public (learn how to participate here) and we’ll make our way to release status based on the feedback and any bugs we may yet find.

What’s new?

• Added interface for adding custom networks
• Added support for extended /server syntax: ‘/server hostname:port password’ (standard server) and ‘/server hostname:+port password’ (SSL server)
• Fixed an issue with the ‘/whois nickname’ command
• Fixed a bug where channels/connections wouldn’t be deleted appropriately
• Redesigned app icon

Screenshots

Here is a screenshot of the new custom server screen:


We also made some slight modifications to the interface to make things a little easier to use. For example, you no longer have to go into Edit mode to connect or disconnect to servers. Simply click on the blue disclosure button and you’re off to the races.

The navigation bar button layout has changed a bit, so that the + and Edit buttons are aligned more closely with Apple’s built-in applications and now the Channels tab is the default, allowing you to start chatting immediately after opening the app.

This should address our two most requested features: Custom servers and SSL. We’re already hard at work on version 1.1, subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date on the latest and greatest.

And what a treat it is. Ever experience problems with large log files or lacking the option of plain text logging? You are going to like what I am about to write.

To briefly describe the problem mentioned above: the current stable release logs messages in a database that has the tendency to grow a little larger than average for a fixed period of time compared to plain text.
We are, of course working on this size issue as well as reintroducing plain text as logging option you can optionally toggle. This means, you can have the database (with all styles, highlights and colors) log for a couple of days only* and keep it at a more than handy size but keep all logs in plain text and move them as you wish.

* The next version of Linkinus will allow you to set an automatic pruning time for old logs. I.e. you can have Linkinus prune logs older than days.

So what else is new? Tab completion will also receive a spec bump. You are in a very crowded channel and want to highlight a person somewhere in the middle of the nicklist? If he was talking to you a minute ago you’ll now be able to tab complete his/her nick way faster than before because Linkinus can now tab complete in “last spoke” order as well as alphabetically.

Stay tuned and if you want to give it an early try, why don’t you opt into the beta program?

We’re thrilled to announce the availability of Linkinus 2.0.2 and Clips 1.5, both now with full compatibility with Snow Leopard as well as something brand new: Chill Pill 1.0 – Mac integration with the Fever RSS reader by Shaun Inman.

Linkinus

Aside from Snow Leopard, 2.0.2 brings numerous new features and bug fixes. Variant support was added for styles, the filter list usability has been greatly improved, two new styles have been introduced: a completely rewritten version of Simplified, dubbed 2.0 by Ben Alman (aka Cowboy), and I Are Sea!, and irssi-inspired style that should please even the most hardcore of IRC users. For a full set of changes, please see the release notes.

Clips

We didn’t stop with Linkinus! Clips 1.5 brings about some much anticipated performance increases. We are always looking for feedback or feature requests, if you have an idea that you’d like to see make it into Clips, drop us a line. For a full set of changes, please see the release notes.

Chill Pill

Chill Pill allows you to enjoy Fever’s rich RSS experience while taking advantage of Cocoa and all of the other modern technologies in Mac OS X.

Filling the void where web applications fail, Chill Pill allows you to set Fever as your default RSS reader, change hot keys via System Preferences, get notified when new items are available, change Fever’s style with custom styles, and much more! To find out more about Chill Pill, and to download it for free, please visit chillpillapp.com.

That aside: Now with Apple having released Snow Leopard to the general public you certainly wonder about Linkinus’ Snow Leopard compatibility – aside from Rosetta of course.

Due to some … let’s say fancy bone of contention concerning scheduling the final 2.0.2 build will be delayed a little while.

Wait, wait wait a minute … to ease the transition as well as give you some chance to test 2.0.2 on Snow Leopard before it’s actually released for real we give you the chance to join the free and public beta so you can see for yourself. Just follow this link and read the instructions that’ll appear on your display drawn in your own blood assuming you agree to the horrible terms.

One thing in particular you beta users will most likely have notice presuming you take a look at the Styles preferences and Simplified in particular: Linkinus now supports Variants.

Variwhat? Variants are, essential the same theme in different color settings. Like Whisper originally shipped separate as Light and Dark version, Simplified now ships as a single theme – with two Variants. This is one of the many new additions to the theming engine. More detailed changes about this and other shiny things we included secretly in this build will be disclosed later in more detail.