Geek and a Half

September 4th, 2007 by Jake

I was recently invited to join the Trillian Astra Alpha Preview, and I must say I’m impressed. While it’s still an alpha release, and there are bugs, there are also MAJOR improvements over Trilian 3.x.

Their central theme is “one contact for all contacts”, if that makse sense. So, you have one contact which in turn holds all your other contacts. My “AstraContact” is SpikeX, and it holds all my IM account information, for AIM, MSN, Google Talk, etc. They have strict privacy controls, as well, allowing you to restrict who can view what.

They’re also going mobile (in two ways). They have a very nice flash-based website that will act as a Meebo-like clone, and then they have this “TrillianMini” thing, it’s pretty much a forum signature banner that shows off your contacts. Oh, and they have an iPhone site set up, too. Whoop-de-frickin-do.

Here’s my Trillian Mini:

(Requires Flash)

Not much, I know, but I’m sure it will be perfected im time for the final release.

There are quite a few bugs I can point out still, but overall it’s coming along very well. If Google Talk doesn’t get its act together and release some updates, I might just switch to Trillian.