Plugins are made available to connect to certain networks and no doubt more are in the pipeline.

http://www.kceasy.com/
The current release was made on the 3rd of december so theres no worries about this becoming a forgotten project.
Far from it , although they had to remove a plugin that gave access to the fastrack network to avoid legal action, the team behind KC Easy are hard at work beta testing a plugin for the Ares network , read about it here.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=635
This Looks like a nice clean client , well done to those responsible
