Trillian turns 8, no Astra beta birthday gift quite yet

Filed under: Windows, Commercial, Freeware, Beta

Trillian turns 8, no Astra beta birthday gift quite yet

by Adam Maras Jul 2nd 2008

We all love applications that take lots of little things and turn them into one big thing. When this concept is applied to instant messaging clients, one program should jump to everyone's mind: Trillian. Ever since its first multi-protocol release in 2000, many Windows users that want all the IM without all the hassle have chosen Trillian as their weapon of choice for tackling their instant messaging needs.

This week marks the eighth anniversary of Trillian's first release. Since then, Cerulean Studios has had over 35 million downloads, and has become one of the (if not the single) most popular instant messaging clients for Windows. Currently, there are two versions of Trillian offered. Trillian Basic, the free version, offers support for AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and IRC chat. Audio chat is available for all of the protocols that support it.

Cerulean Studios also offers Trillian Pro for $25 dollars; the beefed-up version adds support for more protocols like Bonjour, Novell GroupWise, and Jabber, along with support for video chat and third-party plugins for things like mail, weather, and news feeds. Trillian Pro can also combine your contacts who have multiple IM services into "metacontacts," which help you manage your contact list.

Currently in the works is version 4 of Trillian, called Trillian Astra. Astra boasts incredible new features, including its own IM service that helps to integrate the other IM connections, a web interface and an iPhone interface to allow you to chat on all of your protocols anywhere, and a much more streamlined user interface that supports dozens of colors and styles out-of-the-box. Currently, Trillian Astra is in a private alpha phase. However, their development team has stated that there will be a public beta at some point in the future.

Celebrate Trillian's 8th birthday by checking it out if you're looking for a solution to your all your IM needs.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Duffin said 2:10PM on 7-02-2008

Personally, I've given up on Trillian. I was waiting and waiting and waiting for Astra, but then found Digsby which does everything that Trillian Pro does, but free and better. So, if they actually get Astra out, I might give it a try and see which I like better, but I'm having doubts that it will EVER come out at this point.

hexon said 2:26PM on 7-02-2008

A public beta surely will happen sometime this year. This alpha project has lasted over a year, and then their blog shows they are working on emoticons? I'll stick with Digsby until they finally decide to release it. Then I might consider switching if it is truly impressive.

cub3 said 2:33PM on 7-02-2008

I was a hardcore fan of trillian until i also found Digsby. I did try Astra and to tell you the truth it is very very nice. I will keep on using Digsby even when Astra comes out. It is FREE so it is a big difference. Besides anyone that uses Digsby knows that you actually check your emails now and keep them clean.
I love the fact that i dont have to login into my Gmail account to delete a message, i could do that from the Digsby window.

Shariq Ansari said 2:33PM on 7-02-2008

By "Currently in the works" you mean "In the works for ONE MILLION YEARS." Astra is taking forever. Don't get me wrong; I'm a legit Trillian Pro user and I think it's a great program and worth the money, but it's seriously been YEARS since they released anything.

Brandon said 2:49PM on 7-02-2008

Oh and let's not even get to the Mac version of Astra. Granted it's a bit much to work on two separate platform build at once, but there hasn't even been a new IDEA to post up on the Mac Astra Blog. It's been deserted since like November.

hexon said 3:08PM on 7-02-2008

There is no planned native linux support for astra either. Digsby will support mac, linux, and windows.

Bucfann said 3:11PM on 7-02-2008

If anyone is interested, you can download the Alpha client off of a torrent site. The great thing about it is, no matter what build you get, it will update automatically whenever a newer build is out.
Just search Trillian Astra torrent and you can get in on this "private" beta.
You have to wonder though, WTF is taking them so long to finish this up already. Its a friggin messenger client, not an Operating System...

Killswitch On said 3:12PM on 7-02-2008

Ben Carlson said 3:20PM on 7-02-2008

Sign me up for the camp of release-Trillian-Astra-all-freaking-ready.

VitaminCM said 5:29PM on 7-02-2008

I heard that Trillian Astra is supposed to run great on the Linux version of the Palm operating system. Oh yeah that lives with the tooth fairy too.

Khidr said 6:02PM on 7-02-2008

yup. Digsby for the win.

Astra has been in private beta since 11/2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(instant_messenger)

Master Bruce said 7:03PM on 7-02-2008

I was a big fan (and customer) of Trillian for quite some time, but their focus on Astra has left bug fixes on the current version out in the cold. About a month ago I started getting tremendous amounts of IM spam, even though I had the "don't accept messages from people I don't know" option selected. A lot of other people were reporting the same issue and not a single peep from the developers.

I finally had enough and went with Digsby and have been happy ever since.

cub3 said 1:03AM on 7-03-2008

You know i also had the same problem. it was so annoying getting those stupid advertising messages on the yahoo client. I love Digsby, is the best, i just hope that once they reach a large user base they wont jump into Pro or paid versions like Trillian did. I remember the good old days of trillian being free, well torrent fTw

moby said 10:32PM on 7-02-2008

I gave up on Trillian 2 versions ago. I like pidgin and it seems to support (for free) way more 3rd party IM clients than Trillian ever did

boardtc said 5:45AM on 7-04-2008

Echoing a lot of the comments I was a big fan of Trillian from the start until a couple of months ago when I discovered Pidgin - which does simply out of the box what you need Trillian Pro to do - jabber (gmail) integration & spell checking. Astra has been in alpha for about 2 years it seems. Cerulean studios really let us users down in my opinion and for what it was worth I told them as such when I uninstalled Trillian Pro finally and let go...

ANDREZZZ said 11:35AM on 7-07-2008

I have pro version...but the webcam service does not work with new MSN versions...MSN recently changed their service to "Video Conversation" which is different from Video Conference. Trillian does not support "Video Conversation" which is what they're inviting you to. Trillian only supports MSN "Video Conference" which is apparently not supported in the latest version of MSN. At this time, the only workaround is to use the native MSN client.

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