Third time lucky...

It passed! BelleChat, my IRC client for Nokia Symbian Anna and Belle smartphones, is now available from the Nokia Store. The price, as noted in the last entry, is one of your English pounds, or one of your Belgian Euros, of 99 of your American cents.

As the title suggests, it bounced back twice. Mainly because when testing, the Nokia QA person didn't put in a valid IRC server's details, leaving it with the default irc.server.com, which is a fake name. Once I told the QA guys it needs a valid server, they retested it, and told me that I need to add something to the store description to tell users you need a valid IRC server's details. I did this, and added some improvements to the connection procedure code to make it more user-friendly. Gord at Nokia Publish then very kindly put it through QA as a priority, and it passed today! Many thanks to Gord and all at the guys at Nokia Publish.

So what's next? Some ideas I have for version 1.1 include:

• Private messages. At the moment, BelleChat doesn't handle private messages from other users at all. It simply ignores them. It wasn't a priority at first, because I personally don't tend to PM. But I'm not writing it just for me now...
• Support for more advanced IRC features such as ad-hoc NICK changes.
• Ignore lists. sometimes, the only way to deal with an annoying twerp is to empty a sub-machine gun into him ignore him. 
• Better handling of certain messages. Some server and user-generated messaged are just output to the server page. More intelligent handling of these might be useful.

Of course, I need to listen to my paying customers, so I'm going to sit back and rake in the cash see how it's received in the store, and respond to feedback.