I've been testing out the alpha release of Trillian Astra. It's quite exciting because I've never seen an alpha release of anything before. And possibly not even beta. Although I am using a release candidate version of RSS Bandit because it works better than the version I upgraded from and better than the version I could upgrade to.

When I first opened it and got onto MSN I had some notifications of people adding me to my contact list who I thought were already there! And then I got confused as to what to press, so if I've said no to
anybody, it wasn't on purpose.

It's a bit of pain to use, partly because they haven't even added everything in yet that I might want to use, but also because I hate the look of Trillian, so I've always used skins. Trillian is designed to use lots of different messengers in, but for some inexplicable reason they do persist in showing each of them with a coloured dot. I only have Astra, MSN, AIM and Google dots at the moment, but I can't remember for the life of me which colour is which.

Once they bring out the proper thing then I'll get a skin I like and can see things with and that'll be better. I did go and add in the sounds I'm used to (from the skin in the version before 3) so at least it makes (most of) the right noises.

One thing I really liked was the notifications they gave in the taskbar. In the old version, when someone's typing it tells you in words at the bottom of the window. Now it makes the chat tab orange I'm not sure how that'll work with more than one person in the conversation, mind you, I haven't tried that yet. But if you have the window unfocused, it puts a star in the taskbar, just before the name of the person you're chatting with. Which is great, because it means you don't have to check back that they've actually seen your message.

Also, when the window is unfocused, it'll tell you how many messages they've seen that you haven't seen, and start to tell you what they are - how many characters of that it actually manages depends on the length of the thing, which given that I often have a fair bit open, is only about two characters. But it's the thought that counts.

It doesn't have AIM chatroom support yet, so I can only get in if I'm invited. But once there it gives you much better (ie accurate) information about who is there. At the moment, though, it'll only put
people's AIM names in front of their messages, not the name you give them on your conctacts list. So I was very confused in the RS chatroom Sunday night. But that's something they still need to do, I believe.

There were two things I really needed Astra to do. Well, three, but they already promised faster loading and that's impossible to test in the alpha version. I needed it to work with Google chat. Fortunately as I have plenty of Gmail logins (seriously, I'm up to 6 now) that's easy to test. This is something they knew about, and so in Astra you don't have to get the Jabber plugin, you just tick the Google box. I added myself to my contacts list (eventually - they have decided you want to do it in a tiny box where you can only see 10 characters at a time) and chatted. And I could see both sets of comments in both places! So that works.

The other thing was file transfers. It worked with MSN perfectly happily until I upgraded to 3. And then the person on the other end doesn't get the notification. They told me it must be the firewall, but since Trillian was the only thing I changed it must be them - even if it's them not working with my firewall. So it seemed like a good idea to try this in Astra. So dad sends me a file and... nothing. I send him a file and... I can't even work out how to do that. I swear I've right and left clicked everywhere and can't find the option. Yet there are people on the forum complaining about file transfers with MSN being slow so it must logically be there! So that'll be the thing I'll be posting to the forum about.

I did have a slightly bizzare thing where it occasionally gave me horizontal lines between messages. They're not in the text log and disappear if you close the window and re-open it and I never quite worked out a connection between anything I did and them coming up. So no idea what they're about at all.

In conclusion: I like Astra so far. But it will be much better when I can make it look better and therefore be able to see things in it.

2 Responses to “Trillian Astra”

This is What's Cool Says:
Friday 30th May 2008 at 2:37 pm

Do you know if Trillian ever plans to support things like yahoo audibles or msn winks? I think that is the only thing keeping me from using it, since so many people I talk to use those.

Nic Says:
Friday 30th May 2008 at 8:57 pm

I don't know but you might find something about them on the Trillian Forums or you can ask on there. There's certainly always a lot of information on there.