Charla 1.1, an open source Mac OS X application for accessing Yahoo! chat, has been released by developer Peter Ammon.
This version of the relatively new app includes support for sending and displaying fonts, increased customizability, a PM history, and lots more — it also includes several bug fixes. Described by Ammon “as Mac OS X native as it gets,” Charla is written in Cocoa/Objective-C, is multithreaded, and uses the underlying BSD socket layer for communication with the Yahoo! servers.
There’s full support for sending and receiving color fades, bold, underline, italics, links, fonts, and smileys. Ammon said his application also sports “powerful” spam filters.
“When I use Charla, I simply don’t get spammed, either in the main chat window or via Personal Messages (PMs),” he said.
Charla also has the ability to automatically ignore or simply not display chatters who flood (type real fast to fill up the screen) or repeat. The app can also turn ALL CAPS into sentences with proper capitalization. There’s full support for Personal Messages, either within the main chat window or in separate windows.
Charla also has support for status messages. And Ammon said he’s very proud of the app’s “attractive interface.”
To use Charla 1.1, you’ll need Mac OS X, naturally. For more info or to download Charla 1.1 (a 498k file), go to Ammon’s Web site.