Filed under: Internet, Windows
Adam's Favorite Windows Apps: Trillian
by Adam Maras Oct 16th 2008 at 3:00PM
I've blogged about it before, and I'll blog about it again.Back when I was just a wee lad of the Internet, I found a most wonderful concept: instant messaging! At the time, I thought MSN Messenger was the coolest thing since the automatic bread slicer. Of course, my best friend preferred Yahoo! Messenger, and the majority of everyone else I knew would use nothing but AOL Instant Messenger. So, I had two choices: have three relatively bloated instant messaging running simultaneously on my computer, or lose electronic touch with the rest of the world. That is, until I found Trillian.
Trillian, like Digsby or Adium, aggregates multiple different instant messaging services into one relatively light-weight application. The Basic (free) version supports AIM, ICQ, Windows Live, and Yahoo! service as well as IRC chat. The Pro version throws in support for Jabber (Google Talk and soon Facebook), Novell GroupWise, and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous). Also, if you shell out the $25 for the Pro version, you'll get video chat support for the networks that support it.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
geniusofthecrowd said 11:05AM on 10-17-2008
Digsby faults are that it is still slow, can't do AIM chat (which is why I can't use at all because of work), and that there is no native video chat support besides using TokBox which sucks.
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TurboFool said 5:06PM on 10-17-2008
I recently switched to Digsby and never looked back. Handily beats Trillian.
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Loren said 7:36PM on 10-17-2008
Trillian > Pidgin and Digsby for my money. Pidgin's UI still doesn't quite look right with Windows (font size/formatting issues irritate me to the point where I gave up on it), and Digsby *still* doesn't properly support group chats in AIM -- lack of this basic, fundamental feature baffles me. I use AIM group chats every day, so despite anything else Digsby might try to offer me (and they don't support my favored social network, Livejournal, either), it's really a dealbreaker.
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Joshua Tretakoff said 3:21AM on 10-18-2008
Ok, this is sure to inspire some great flames, but here goes:
Trillian, as it is today, is worthy of all of these comments. However, Trillian Astra, which I have been beta testing for quite a while, makes the rest of these look like amateur hour. The latest version integrates Facebook seamlessly, and it is easily the most stable, professional, and powerful IM client I have used.
Like most of the commenters here, I have also used Digsby. While I do like it's good connectivity to the multiple chat services, I find it's interface to be childish and wonky. The skins are cartoonish, and practically unusable: the mere poor readability and sheer real estate each chat window requires to read a simple IM conversation is unacceptable. Sure, it ships with 900 skins to try to allow customization, but not one of them offers maximum information display and all are variants of left/right and color. If it had a thriving developer community, perhaps that could be corrected, but hey; it's been out for a while now, and not one good resource has emerged.
Astra, on the other hand, has steadily evolved on the basics that made Trillian so good: excellent conversation management, superb archiving and search capabilities, and extensibility that allows it to be an invaluable app. Embedded RSS feeds? One plug in away, and actually readable in the small contact list real estate. Multiple window management? Hello, containers. And yes, the skins are superb, with each offering excellent readability and notification options, without looking like a 5 year old drew them. Add to that a perfect web version, archiving, and integrated Google desktop search options, and it's still the clear winner.
Personally, I'm happy to pay the $25 for the application. Yes, I think Astra should have shipped long before this. I do think that a lack of Skype integration is a glaring hole that can be addressed with add-ons, but that's a statement that can be made for any of these clients (hey, video chat folks, there is simply nothing better on the PC than Skype). And yes, I think Trillian's commitment to quality rather than speed to market is costing them, and making room for competitors like Digsby. And yes, I have an unfair advantage being in the beta. So, I'd say with all of those caveats, I can completely understand why the other comments here speak so highly of Digsby.
The release of Astra will once again make it clear why Trillian is still the best choice. But until then, the rest of these commenters have excellent points. I can only be grateful I have been using Astra for months, and extend my recommendation for it, for anyone looking to use a real multiservice IM client in any sort of professional atmosphere.
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-=Ben=- said 12:38PM on 10-18-2008
Okay, Hello
please stop editing the posts, every day I read your RSS then I have to read it all again cause you edit every article!
Please stop
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LinearMode said 2:07PM on 10-19-2008
lol i cant believe how many people actually like pidgins primitive services...
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Randallrocks said 11:40PM on 10-19-2008
I definitely agree that Pidgin is a million times better than Trillian. It's open-source, has a nice interface compared to Trillian, can check for unread email messages, and supports many more clients than Trillian. Plus, there's one version. Free with all features. Only complaint might be that sometimes it doesn't show up in the system tray, but that's okay, because I use RocketDock and can just click on the Pidgin logo.
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boardtc said 10:46AM on 10-20-2008
I was a big fan of Trillian from the start until early this year when I discovered Pidgin - which does simply out of the box what you need Trillian Pro to do - jabber (gmail) integration & spell checking. Pidgin has plugins for facebook and skype too. Trillian's 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...
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hipsterdoofus said 2:08PM on 10-20-2008
I began using Miranda when I was looking for a multi-IM client for an older computer - Miranda was so nice (and unbloated) that I switched over to it on all my computers, even the faster ones...its not fancy but does the trick and is open source.
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Doranwen said 9:57PM on 10-21-2008
I actually LIKE Trillian the best of anything I've tried. It saves history in nice log files, which are just txt files with a different extension. I save all my chat history in txt files each day, and was doing so back when I ran MSN and Yahoo Messenger simultaneously. When I switched to Trillian, I found it a breeze that it saved them for me instead, and all I had to do was rename the log file, delete the xml, and I started fresh each day. If I want to do video/audio chats, I have Skype for that purpose--most of the time I don't have the time, nor do my friends, and Trillian is simple, smooth on the eyes (I love the light, unobtrusive blue scheme), and maximizes information space in the chat window, rather than spending an excessive amount of screen real estate on fancy schmancy themes and environments that would just drive me bonkers anyway. I'm all for efficiency and simplicity, and Trillian does that while letting me connect to all my different networks. The day another multi-IM prog can tackle my chat history and present itself visually the same way Trillian does, I might give it a shot. But I have yet to see that.
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Nimb said 4:51PM on 10-25-2008
Trillian was great back in the day before it go to bloated with junk no one uses. Since then its has more features the an IM Client should. And there are so many better free alternatives out there
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