Trillian Astra
The good folks are Cerulean Studios have finally published information regarding their forthcoming Trillian Astra project. The basic idea behind this anticipated update sounds great and appears to be catered towards answering many of the more popular requests that users have made over the years. Nothing could be more wonderful than that!
In case you have never used Trillian before, it is a multi-network instant messaging application for Windows. Rather than using the official AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and GTalk clients, one merely loads up Trillian and can connect to each of those network, integrating their buddy lists from all networks in to a single interface. Trillian has always been skinnable although the skinning engine has been far too complex for a normal user. This is the reason that there is not a wide variety of skins available for Trillian. Hopefully, this has been fixed.
Some of the more exciting features that I am looking forward to in Trillian Astra are the following:
- Trillian Astra represents the ultimate in flexible, efficient memory usage; required memory usage for XML routines has been reduced by roughly 5MB and various other trimmings will decrease the footprint further. If pretty graphics aren’t for you, using a barebones skin drops memory usage even more.
- Trillian Astra allows you to easily hand out a single account name to your friends and family so that they can find the right screen name to add to their client of choice. Trillian Astra allows your contact information to be exported to anyone who requests it (within privacy restrictions you define), making it easier than ever to describe your digital presence to your contacts.
- Bypassing the sometimes unnecessary option of creating a permanent new away message, you can now type messages directly into the contact list to be immediately set across all available services.
- Trillian Astra skins can now be modified on the fly, no longer requiring a restart.
- Trillian Astra skins are now capable of being more integrated with your existing Windows theme by way of “theme support,” which allows you to match Trillian’s colors to those of your current configuration without creating a special skin to do so.
Trillian Astra sounds quite exciting and appears to be headed down the right path. I eagerly await any alpha, beta or publicly available releases in order to test it. Have been a long time Trillian user, and having participated in past alpha and beta test cycles, I am pretty stoked to see the good folks at Cerulean Studios finally moving forward with an exciting upgrade to their exceptional instant messaging client.
In fact, I remember working a deal with Scott Werndorfer of Cerulean Studios way back in the day, which allowed deviantART to power their skins section. Unfortunately, that deal took shape right around the onset of the great bandwidth crisis of 2001 and things ended up falling through. Nevertheless, I have always been a big fan of their work.
First time I hear about their Astra project, but it sure sounds and looks exciting. I have been using Trillian since one of their first releases and never looked back. I hope they’ll offer some more functionality similar to and compatibility with the first-party software for each service.
Can’t wait :-)
Hello Jark, wow you still remember the skins contest for Trillian? Haha, here’s the winner. And producing the default skin of Trillian Astra still. :D
I’ve used trillian before, and had used it for a couple of years before I came across another multi protocol chat client called Miranda, which is unbelievably fast at loading up, and customizable to the core.
I would switch back to Trillian if the loading time was faster. :)
I hope Trillian Astra fixes some of the slow issues it had before.
Kid: I definitely remember the skins contest and all the fun that we had back in the day. It was really all a lot of fun that just seemed to disappear thanks to the bandwidth issues deviantART faced back then.
Sunira: Miranda IM is quite nice, I agree. I especially like the community that surrounds Miranda and all the wonderful extra’s that are made for it. Many of the addons for Miranda are quite nice, such as Modern Contact List Layered, IEview, Meta-Contacts, etc… It is a great product that I think Trillian can learn a lot from.
I love this.
I used to use Trillian, but I switched awhile back to GAIM.
I must admit, I’ve considered switching back, especially since Trillian has webcam support in the pro version.
Hmm. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the new version. If it’s as good as they say, it might be worth it to register…