Trillian Beta Goes Public

[george]

Trillian beta goes public

Trillian Astra, which has been in development for nearly three years, is now available to users as a public beta. You won't need to register for a private key to download it, although if you've been using it since we reported on the Astra beta in April, it might be time for an upgrade.

In announcing on the Trillian blog Tuesday that the beta is now public, Cerulean Studios also said the latest build of the multi-protocol chat client fixes bugs related to server-based problems. The company clearly has confidence in the beta, though, since they've made it the featured product on their download page. Users can still grab Trillian 3.1, the latest stable build, but only from a link off to the side.

On the Trillian download page, you can also see that Cerulean Studios has plans for Mac, iPhone, and Web-based clients. So far, none of those versions is available for public testing.

http://www.trillian.im/download/

[Phil Conners]

A similar but better product is Digsby - www.digsby.com.

[Veazer]

A similar but better product is Digsby - www.digsby.com.

No Skype support

[Phil Conners]

A similar but better product is Digsby - www.digsby.com.

No Skype support

Yeah I know Trillian Astra is all singing, all dancing, but

1) It's bloatware

2) It's not free

3) It's beta software

4) Even though Digsby doesn't support Skype at the moment I much prefer it's interface over Trillians. Try them both and compare, maybe you'll agree.

[george]

A similar but better product is Digsby - www.digsby.com.

No Skype support

1) It's bloatware

Could you please elaborate about why it's bloatware? The Ask Toolbar it want to install is optional.

[nikster]

For simply all in one instant messaging, pidgin is way better. Don't know digsby, is that a derivative of pidgin?

I used Trillian free for a while on Windows (the old one, without Skype or voice call support) and found it simply awful. The whole user interface is a complete mess, like they tried to make it better than the Windows standard but failed dramatically. It had lots of annoying little "features" - like copying text to the clipboard on select, so you'd select a text, and poof whatever you had in the clipboard got replaced with the selected text, thanksabunch. Preferences didn't make any sense whatsoever, but - a telltale sign of poor user interface design - you had two different choices for the preferences interface. Both impossible to use.

It crashed a lot too. And the free version didn't show people's status.

All in all, just really awful software. But who knows maybe the new one's better? It better be, really..... I wouldn't usually take the time to post negatives on something, but Trillian was so bad and pissed me off so much that it deserves mention.

Edited June 11, 2009 by nikster

[Phil Conners]

A similar but better product is Digsby - www.digsby.com.

No Skype support

1) It's bloatware

Could you please elaborate about why it's bloatware? The Ask Toolbar it want to install is optional.

If I'd wanted to include the Ask toolbar in the equation I would have called it malware.

By bloatware I mean it just seem like the designers have tried to cram everything in with a shovel. No organization between the protocols, it's just a mess. Try Digsby for a comparison. Each protocol get's its own tray icon so you can see what is going on where. Easy and convenient to use.

IMO.