Bingo's Chat

Bingo's Chat is a small LAN messaging client whose purpose is to help you chat with your friends, send files, and organize a voice conference with other users in the local network.

The program does not impress much in the visual department. It implements a bunch of buttons for triggering important features but they are too small, making it difficult for you to understand the function of each parameter.

Changing the looks of the GUI can be done by applying different skins. There’s no support for a help manual, so you need to take some time and experiment with the built-in features.

A notice board keeps you informed with your new chat messages and other types of notifications.

Bingo's Chat allows you to change the color of the text, add emoticons, links, and quotes, send files and folders, insert images (JPEG, GIF or BMP file format), paste image from the clipboard, as well as embed a set of custom phrases for quick insertion.

You can set a status (‘I’m not here,’ ‘Do Not Disturb’), refresh the list with users, make a call, keep logs with your conversations, and automatically display the ‘Away’ status if you are idle for a custom number of minutes.

Bingo's Chat gives you the possibility to change your avatar by loading a custom image from your computer, provide information about the mobile phone, ICQ, email address, website, and home address, and automatically send a greeting message to a user.

You can block users, set the volume while holding conferences, assign hotkeys for faster actions, play sound notifications upon various events (e.g. new message, changed topic, private message), import custom emoticons, and ban users based on a list with bad words.

What’s more, you can password-protect the program, pick the saving directory, as well as save the current configuration settings to a file so you can import them in the future in case of crashes or other errors.

Bingo's Chat does not bring anything new to the software category of LAN messaging clients. It includes a useful set of features but it still needs some improvements to make the GUI look cleaner and easier to work with.