I use IRC very infrequently. Mostly, I just leave it hidden in the system tray and only touch it if someone contacts me first (it's the primary form of real type communication for a FOSS project I work with, although we also have a forum that I prefer to use).

I'm currently using Hexchat, and my biggest complaint is that I often miss notifications. The only notification that I get is a minor change to the icon in the system tray. What I'd prefer is a desktop notification.

If possible, I'd also like the following features (although desktop notifications is the most important):

* Can auto-join a specific channel on startup
* Can auto-reconnect if connection is lost
* Can display timestamps in UTC

Other than that, I don't really care about anything else.

Alternatively, some way to make Hexchat display desktop notifications would be great.