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.
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter. 
That said, considering how articles are posted here in CNET it's bloody hard to tell 'blogs' from actual 'articles'. Keep up the "good" work, CNET. <DOUBLE sarcasm>
There are already faster and better alternatives out there.
After getting tired of waiting for the arrival of Trillian Astra, I've begun using Pidgin.
Pidgin in my opinion is way faster and simpler to use than both Trillian 3 and the Trillian Astra beta
and I don't think I'll ever go back.
- Long release cycle
- Closed (limited) feedback audience
- Make one monolith software that does everything so-so, and nothing exceptionally
They have invested three years into this, and opened it for public just now. Big mistake. In the meantime the competitors did shorter more agile release cycles, focused on essential functionality. I am afraid that Trillian Astra is already outdated, due to late feedback. Quite the opposite result of what the intentions initially were.
Trillian, like Pidgin and Digsby (i'm sure there are others), is a multi-protocol IM client application that allows you to connect to multiple chat interfaces. So you would be able to log on to all the popular ones (AIM, Y!, MSIM, and ICQ), as well as other ones. Sorry I'm not sure which other networks Trillian supports because I, like others, have moved on to either Pidgin or Digsby.
I only wish this had been released before some of the other programs came out. But it's a solid product with lots of improvements, even before all the bug fixes!
Even so, I'm trying out the beta and I have to say that it's really nice. It looks absolutely amazing and I've not had any problems with it. I'm connected to Yahoo, MSN (twice with two different IDs), AOL, and XMPP. I have buddies listed multiple times (for different networks) and I'm able to group them as a single buddy. I'd definitely recommend it as one of the options one might consider.
- by LapDRx June 11, 2009 7:42 PM PDT
- Trillian has been around for a long time. I remember beck in 2000 when Yahoo kept changing their format just so Trillian couldn't tap in. But they always kept up. Gott give their props to that. Then in 02 the lawsuit. MSN jumped in then Time Warner aquired AOL and they jumped in. Astra been beta testing mainly for that and some other minor bug reasons. So when I hear that this one or that one is better, Trillian may not have been the 1st to try the multi messenger game, but it was the best in its day.
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