xconvers by Joop Stakenborg <pa4tu@amsat.org>
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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.gnome.org), a user interface builder
for GTK, designing the UI proved to be rather easy!

Thanks for all the people who have tested this software. I hang around on
channel 44 on the worldwide convers sometimes.
