IRC stands for “Internet Relay Chat”. It is a multi-user chat system, where people meet on “channels” (rooms, virtual places, usually with a certain topic of conversation) to talk in groups, or privately.
There is no restriction to the number of people that can participate in a given discussion, or the number of channels that can be formed on IRC.

As a user you run a “client” program which connects to a “server” in an IRC network. Several larger and smaller IRC networks exist. The largest one, called EFnet (Eris Free net), usually serves over 15000 users at any given moment. Smaller ones, like Undernet (10000) and Dalnet (5000), are a lot less populated but often offer more stability and convenience.

The easiest way is to use the “Chat Directory” I’ve built. You can find this by using the ‘Rooms Browser’ from the main menu (bottom left button).

If you’re on some other website within the Rooms Browser, then you always can get back to the Chat Directory by using the arrow bottom right.

Yep. Most networks have thousands of chat rooms.

Tap the Join button in the navigation bar, select a connection/server and tap the little blue bookmark icon on its right. Rooms will then load all the networks chat rooms and provide you with a list which can even be ordered by the user count of the rooms.

Sure

From every chat room you can use the ‘Invite a friend’ button from the Rooms menu to invite a friend to this room.

Suuuure

You can join those chat rooms on any computer from any place in the world too
Btw: Using the ‘Invite a friend’ menu button already provides all needed informations for your friends!

There are lots of “IRC clients” for every operating system.

Heres a example list for nearly every operating system.

Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients

IRC Operating Systems

The most known for windows should be “mIRC” (which costs some dollars though), for mac is “Colloquy” and for Linux/Unix its “BitchX”.

Nearly every of them also are able to handle the irc:// URL after they are installed.

That means, that the user only have to install them (maybe start the app once) and then click on the link. (The browser should open the IRC programm then)

But its also not hard to add server & chat room manually in the most.

Tap the info button in the bottom left, maybe scroll a bit down to the options for the current connection and then select “Change nickname”

These are two different things. Favorites and autojoins.

Favorites are just for not having to type a room name every time you want to join it manually. Within the join dialog just type it once and then hit the star at its right. Next time you can quickly select it from the favorites list within the join dialog.

Autojoins however are for letting Rooms join those chat rooms automatically on every (re-)connect. You can add them in two ways:

• Either open the chat room information dialog by tapping the topic above the chat room or select it from the main menu.

• Or go to [main menu > settings > connection settings > tap 'edit' > select connection > select autojoin > add one...]

You can either change the encoding for a specific chat room* or even for the whole connection:

* The chat room encoding will be resetted every reconnect. This will be fixed and saved in a further update…

If you are having problems connecting to some IRC network, then you could try to ‘debug’ that issue yourself by doing the following:

• Tap the connection within the connection overview to bring up the console (you need not to be in the edit mode)
• Search for some helpful information within the servers responses (mostly at the bottom)
• Eventually copy’n'paste/screenshot these informations into the support room (providing an email address if I’m currently not available) or just send me an email

Seems they’ve currently shut down the standard port.
Try switching the connections port to 6666 or delete the connection and then re-add it using Rooms Browser.
Please consider updating your iTunes app review afterwards, since this is really not my fault :-/

You can upload images from your photo album or camera directly “to the chat”.
Therefor, just tap the chat input bar so they keyboard comes up and then tap the little button to the left, to slide down the keyboard and show some more controls.

In fact those images will be uploaded to our server returning the public link to this image.

Every uploaded image will be saved to our database along with your unique DeviceID. This way you can retrieve all your images later again using the ‘My Onlinealbum’ link within Rooms.

So you should think twice to which persons you’ll send the link to your ‘album’.

Don’t upload anything that can be even remotely construed as porn, copyrighted material, harassment, or spam. If you do, we will ban you, delete all your images, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on our service.

To join the ustream chat network add a new connection using “chat1.ustream.tv” for the server.
You can now simply join the network as guest to listen to the most chat rooms.
If you also want to talk to the chat rooms, you have to use your ustream account for the most chat rooms.
So put in your ustream account into the connections nickname field and your ustream password into the server password field (not the nickname password field!).

Rooms actually understands only some common IRC commands like /me, /nick, /msg and some more. But anyway you can use ANY IRC command you like, since Rooms is able to handle “IRC RAW commands”.

List of Internet Relay Chat commands

[Keep that in mind that if you have jailbroken your device that may also be a reason for some problems (memory problems, backgrounder, ...)]

Sometimes on updates the app gets “confused” and won’t even start anymore. It’s rare and so we are not sure if its Apples updater or really any bug, but it may happen. So here’s how to fix this…

The first thing you should try is to “restart” Rooms completely. On iPhone 3Gs/4 for example it may run in the background even if you push the home button.
So either restart your iPhone/iPod or doubletap the home button for getting the fast switch bar and tap + keep holding your finger onto the Rooms Icon until it shakes. You will then see the red button to really close it. After doing this, just try to restart it and see if it works.

If restarting doesn’t work, please remove Rooms from your device and reinstall it by “buying” it from the store again or sync it again using iTunes. Since you already bought it, it will not cost again. Although the app store at first just shows the “Buy” button it will remind you on downloading that you already bought it.
Reinstalling the app will reset all your current settings within Rooms (connections, …), so please keep that in mind!

IF that really doesn’t help after all, the last thing would be to notify me so we can look into that together. Mostly I will need some crash reports, but I will help you to find all this. So feel free to send me an email in that or other cases.

See Changes for upcoming release

It will come out when it seems ready ;o)