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Trillian 3.0 Released
Octagon Most writes "Cerulean Studios has released Trillian Pro 3.0 which is still interacting with AIM, Yahoo, MSN instant messagers with impunity. It has a cool new Instant Lookup feature which links to Wikipedia, and a serverless messaging mode using Rendezvous. The free version is now Trillian Basic 3.0. Trillian is still Windows only, and if you don't like the FAQ response regarding Linux and Mac support let 'em know."
I like Trillian, it has a lot of nice features and looks pretty. However I switched to gaim because of it's cross platform support.
The serverless messaging sounds nice, but for Linux there are already a few multi-network clients. I remember Trillian as being a bit bloated, but that was several years ago. It was cool, though, as it was the first client I had heard of to use all major services.
--dingletec--
Is there a point to free Trillian anymore? I'm not knocking it (much..), I did use it once upon a time and tbh it was very good, nice eye candy too, but since finding GAIM I haven't looked back.
nbiar
"Is there Mac or Linux support?"
"No."
Missing text is:
"Is there a better option than Trillian for this support?"
"Yes, it's called GAIM -- http://gaim.sourceforge.net"
Adium doesn't have all the features of Trillian yet, but it's getting nicer each release. Plus it supports more IM protocols (it's based on libgaim).
I used to use gaim for the longest time, but often times found it frusterating. When I first got it, I tried for about 2 hours, with no evial, to change how the text appeard on my end. Not to mention that it is hard to find everything, and I think the connection manager is lacking several important featres.
I've been using Trillian Pro for a few months, and Pro 3 since the alpha version was released, and I absolutly love it. The tabs are much better than GAIM's, and I can have multipul tabs, for my friends, family, IRC, or just one huge one if thats what I want.
The one thing that trillian totaly owns gaim in, is it's plugins. They are so awesome, and offered free by Trillian. The spellchecker is something i've needed for so long (as i'm sure you can tell).:-P
Anyways, before you go and bash Trillian because it costs money, look at all the features you are getting.
They do support HTML profiles/away messages with their MiniBrowser plugin.
The thing that urked me about Trillian, and it still may be true today, is that it mangles UTF-8 text. Sending Japanese back and forth between trillian to trillian works fine, but trillian to aim/iChat/gaim and it gets mangled. Another thing that urks me, is that their audio/video chat don't "Just work" like it does with iChat (though it is compatible).
[end rant]
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
and in addition there is miranda (mirando-im.org). It is: ...
- Windows/wine only
but it is:
- GPLed software
- its also free as infree beer
and it is even more powerful than trillian
Wikipedia in-depth comparison of instant messengers, including gaim and trillian.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Since this morning.
Trillian 3.0 includes a Basic (free) and Pro (not free) version. The basic version feels very much like 1.0 Pro, with the odd feature from 2.0 Pro. They're done a fair amount of updating with useful little features, and they run from the same codebase now.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Why Use trillian?
1. Its simple.
2. It auto-updates now with 3.0
3. Very customizeable
4. Great plugin support
5. Feature rich
6. Fast/Efficient
7. Well known
I can go on and on. I use trillian for the above reasons and the superb support and almost up to the minute fixes for bugs/network changes and such.
There is a reason you pay for software or use the free variants thereof. The service trillian offers ontop of a great IM client is worth the cause.
Miranda beats Trillian hands down.
Miranda is open source.
Miranda seamlessly imports contact lists from Y!,ICQ and MSN.
Miranda can use Y!,MSN,ICQ,IRC,AIM,Jabber and loads more.
Miranda can run it all in a single nice window.
Miranda has fully customisable skins and icons.
Miranda has no adverts, ever.
Miranda has plug-ins galore...
Some of my favourite plugins are -
CAPS_LOCK flasher - incoming message? Your keyboard lights flash.
'WUMF' -Who is using my files? - Popup saying who accesses your files on a network and when, and will log all of this information.
Postit notes and reminders.
There are many more plugins.
Miranda is totally free, is open source, and simply is better than Trillian, and even Gaim.
Download it, no spyware, no ad-ware from http://www.miranda-im.org/
Adware? I think not. The only things that could be considered to be ads in Trillian Basic are the "Upgrade to Trillian Pro" menu item and the blurb about Pro in the Preferences screen. I don't think that's unreasonable that they want to sell the premiere version of their product, pushing it a little through the free one. There are no external ads whatsoever in the program.
That's not adware.. it's nagware.
I just upgraded to Trillian 3.0 and let me tell you that I'm not amazed like I was with the 2.0 upgrade.
First of all, the skin support is absolutely horrible. The last updated skin is from January 2004. My trillian 2.0 skin works fine although the some of the new options really ruin its look.
After a bit of fiddling around, I got it back to to the good ol' look that I really liked (minimalistic).
By default, ALL the IM protocols are disabled. This means you have to go in and enable them, which I found to be a little annoying for an expert user. Although a beginner would not find it a lot more complex.
One of the great features of defining the size in pixels has been disabled which i really enjoyed. The main reason is because with that feature, you can just define a size and all your windows will be the same size.
The tabbed windows are a great addition, but i'm more of a fan of individual windows.
Overall, a quick looks shows great addition and bugfixes. I'll try using it for now, but I may revert to 2.0 in the future if things dont go smoothly.
It's not even so much that we're uninterested, it's that we know Trillian isn't really as well-suited to the model of MacOS X or Linux applications. (FWIW, at least two Trillian developers -- including me -- have Macs as well as windows boxes. I'm posting this from Safari, in fact.)
/do/ periodically re-examine the possibility, but...
:)
I develop Mac OS X software in my spare time, and I can tell you flat out that Trillian would violate the Aqua Design Guidelines six ways from Sunday unless completely reworked, just for starters. (Of course, a depressing number of Macintosh applications also do, but still.) And for a small development team, trying to keep a single code tree in sync across multiple platforms without making it suffer overall, would be hard; that's something far easier for an OSS project. We
Honestly, Trillian's designed not for the power-users who want to get down and dirty with every little aspect of an IM protocol, or for OSS activists. It's designed, as has been noted, more for Joe Average; this is why Trillian 3.0 is made to look and feel more like a Windows XP application in the preferences system and whatnot. And to some extent, that userbase tends to be more prominent on Windows.
For those who are really into OSS or are on Linux, Sean and the others who work on it have made a great app in Gaim. And for those who are on Mac OS X, Adium X is pretty kickass. Heck, even the new iChat in Tiger is pretty straightforward for Joe Average Mac User.
It's not like there's some Highlander-esque 'there can be only one!' situation with instant messaging clients. You'll even notice we at Cerulean are on good terms with the Gaim team; when Yahoo locked everyone out last time, we deciphered the new login protocol and donated it to Gaim (and to Adium as a result). You can find other instances in the Gaim changelog of code donated from Trillian; it's certainly not like we're out to kill open source and crush all opposition or something. ("I am Trillian MacLeod of the clan MacLeod, and I've come to take your head developer!")
Gaim and Trillian are made to fill a different niches. If one's right for you, great! Doesn't mean the other one isn't right for other people.
--Rachel
That's a fiction put there to protect them from being sued by AOL. It's really called gAIM.
I am trolling
Donations are donations, but they send 50% of everything they make on sales to the IM companies.
I am trolling
I don't undesrtand you people: why bother with some closed source IM client? ;) but the one scrolling bug I've got I just fixed myself... Opensource is still Opensource. :) But I still think its win32 version is immature.
Did you try Miranda?
I can tell you that Miranda serves me 3 years already... No single glitch. Well.. not really
Go Miranda.
GAIM rules too
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Thank you for the comment! And no, we're not designing exclusively for the average user -- as you note, the plugin architecture exists, and has been expanded on for this release -- but the average user is still a major consideration in everything. :)
/right/ for every platform it runs on. A lot of Linux apps ported to Mac OS X or Windows still feel like Linux apps, for instance. To do an IM client /right/ for OS X, we'd want to integrate into the Address Book, replace our notification system with Growl, support the system-wide spellchecker, and so on.
/is/ an OS X application which integrates with the Address Book, uses Growl for notifications, and integrates with the system-wide spellchecker. It's called Adium X. ;)
Like I said, periodically we re-examine the possibility of ports, but in all honesty, it's not that likely to happen. Even starting from scratch wouldn't help that much; it's still a small team, and maintaining a Mac OS X tree, a Linux tree and a Windows tree would be a huge headache.
It's likely that one or all would suffer; you'll notice most cross-platform projects tend to aim for a common denominator. Take, for instance, Thunderbird; Thunderbird is a great app (and under Windows, my first choice in mail clients), but most Mac users I know don't use Thunderbird. Why? Because Thunderbird doesn't do things Mac-ishly. Thunderbird doesn't integrate with the system spellchecker framework. It doesn't integrate with the system Address Book framework.
It's really hard to design a cross-platform product of any kind and have it actually feel
Of course, there already
Seriously, if you're really stuck right now for a multi-network option under OS X, I strongly recommend checking out Adium; Adam Iser and his team have built a really good client that integrates well with OS X, and it's worth at least looking at.
--Rachel