Posted by jervant 4 hours ago
I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.
The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon tail dragging behavior just right...
one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw
It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new!
Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :)
Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...
The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.
It was fun messing with these folks, though, since they were often oblivious to IRC and internet culture in general. Or they were just completely tech illiterate, but somehow ended up starting Comic Chat, and somehow ended up on our obscure servers.
># Appears as TIKI (#G010E010M1)
if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) {
Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.
I can't believe this is still going