Polari is an Internet Chat Client designed specifically for GNOME 3. The first commit made by Florian Mullner on June 19, and work started around GUADEC in August. So it is a quite new project.

Does it work? Yep!

Florian Mullner and John McCann are online on Polari room. The developer and the designer of Polari.

Objectives

Talk in chat rooms

Save history

Clearly identify “mentions”

Allow easy access to history

Remember last used rooms

Offer sensible list of networks

Detect links posted in the room and display them

Support saving or sending transcripts

Native GNOME 3 notifications

Integrated pastebin support

Integrated bugzilla support

File transfers

Support for 20+ rooms and private chats

Contacts integration (display servers, nicks and availability in GNOME Contacts)?

When

Polari is proposed for GNOME 3.12

https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointEleven/Features/Polari

Florian Mullner says:

Polari is a simple IRC client designed for GNOME 3. Tentative designs have been around for a while, but hacking only started around Guadec. It is obviously not end-user ready at that point, but I’m confident that it can be in time for 3.12, thus this feature proposal.

Some Features

Don’t expect Polari to be as feature complete as X Chat, but it looks good, it does what suppose to do and it will have this unique integration with GNOME 3 that all new GNOME 3 applications deliver!

Typical Selection mechanism of newer GNOME 3 Apps, with this nice light blue

Connect to a new server is available from Application Menu only

Connection Details are quite limited at this time

Join a room gives you a list with the servers that you are connected

Polari is on the very early steps, so nothing much else to show. But it has potential! Similar design plans are also discussed for Empathy, but there isn’t any implementation yet.

To build it you will need a JHBuild installation. Even if it is possible now to compile it in a 3.10 environment, Polari will soon require 3.11.x dependencies.

See more at Wikis!

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Potential/Polari

https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointEleven/Features/Polari

By the way if you see the Tentative designs on Wikis, I have to say that the reality is quite different. Polari looks and feels much much better than mock-ups!

Polari is written in Javascript and C