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Trillian 3.0 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the idling-for-fun-and-profit dept.

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."

4 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Trillian is nice, but gaim has cross platform supp by sjrstory · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Wikipedia by BReflection · · Score: 5, Informative

    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))"
  3. Re:Use Miranda. by Khuffie · · Score: 4, Informative
    Miranda seamlessly imports contact lists from Y!,ICQ and MSN.

    So does Trillian

    Miranda can run it all in a single nice window.

    So does Trillian

    Miranda has fully customisable skins and icons.

    So does Trillian.

    Miranda has no adverts, ever.

    Neither does Trillian (both free and pro)

    Miranda has plug-ins galore...

    Trillian has plenty of plugins, and most of them are actually useful. The whole list of Miranda's plugins is not only scary, but a vast majority of them are completely mundane.

    Miranda is totally free, is open source, and simply is better than Trillian, and even Gaim.

    Trillian also has a totally free version. Granted it's not open source, but why should we hold that against them? They've also been known to help out: when the folks at Trillian figured out a bug with the Yahoo! IM connection stuff, they sent the fix to the folks at gaim.

    If you really want to compare things, the 'out of the box' experience in Trillian is far superior to that of Miranda. I recall spending an hour on Miranda a couple of months ago to get it to look/work just right, and it still ended up looking ugly as sin. On the other hand, all I need to do is install Trillian, and a vast majority of these 'plugins' that Miranda needs are already built in.

  4. Re:No Mac/Linux Support by Sparks23 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

    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 /do/ periodically re-examine the possibility, but...

    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