Trillian 4

By Cyrris

I’ve been using Trillian for a long time now - ever since I realised that a bunch of my stubborn friends wouldn’t come and use ICQ with me. I never liked MSN, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to have two contact lists open at once, so Trillian was the right program at the right time. It wasn’t without its problems of course - I often had (and still have) issues with Trillian 3.1 - messages not getting through, clunky performance, and such. That said, it has still been the communications hub of my computer for years now and I can’t imagine life without it. One thing that has bugged me more recently though is the lack of development updates. Trillian 4, codenamed Astra, was announced some time ago, but it was only when I awoke this morning, a few months after the announcement, that I found a preview site had finally been launched. It sure explains the lack of updates.

Essentially, Trillian Astra looks like the most ambitious version leap in the programs history. Boring Flash presentations aside, the real meat is located here. The new default skin looks quite nice - it appears that they’re definitely going for a look and feel that will feel at home on Windows Vista. The performance improvements, if as substantial as they claim, will be a very welcome change from the current release. As far as the supported networks go, the addition of Google Talk as its own plugin for those who don’t want to bother with other Jabber services is nice. They also added support for MySpace IM. Whether this is a good or bad thing is debatable, but needless to say it’s not something that I’ll be bothering with.

While they didn’t come out and directly say so, it also looks like Adium’s reign as the major multi-IM client on the Mac may soon be under attack, and likewise with GAIM on Linux. They dropped the following hint:

Currently, all Cerulean-developed network plugins are powered by IMCore. Which means they all compile on Linux and OSX. Which means…

Being a simple Windows user this doesn’t really affect me, but this could be good for people who like using the same programs on their different platforms.

A good lot of no-brainers have also been finally implemented. Now the contact list will only show a scrollbar when needed - something sorely lacking in each previous Trillian release, which drove me nuts. I actually had to fiddle around with a few of the innards of Trillian’s display files to remove scrollbars completely, before I was satisfied. Using AIM and ICQ should now work properly. I know with Trillian 3, I’ve had Kelmon’s AIM account oddly duplicated on my contact list before, presumably from me having both an ICQ and AIM account, and ICQ/AIM being interoperable themselves.

Which brings me to a question - if ICQ and AIM are interoperable, and more recently MSN (well, I believe it’s called “Windows Live” now) Messenger can talk with Yahoo, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they can all talk to each other. In a world like that, is there much room left over for a program like Trillian? Astra looks like it will arrive with a boatload of additional odd features, such as widgets, RSS, and of course the usual room for more plugins. Are these superfluous features going to keep people using Trillian if all the IM networks are soon talking to each other on their own?