There is also some GUI clients that are designed with the server/client model. Essentially you have a little daemon running that is connected to IRC constantly and then you got a GUI you hook up to it. Personally I use Quassel, but there is also Smuxi (which I couldn't get working for some reason..).
Have you seen QuasselDroid? It's the Android client for Quassel, I'm working on a Material redesign for it right now ^_^
You should also try the quassel webproxy (a web interface like IRCCloud) and the quassel-search tool, which allows you to search through the whole logs of everything.
- http://quassel-irc.org/
- https://github.com/meebey/smuxi