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.

July 28th, 2006 by Jake

Alright, it’s time to see who really reads these.

If you would like an invitation to the Maxthon Invited Preview, please leave a comment with a valid e-mail address (I promise you won’t get spam).

The current alpha I’m running (2.0.0.5256) doesn’t have all the features of Maxthon 1.5.x yet, but I’ll give them leniancy there because the control panel is now 100% HTML and JavaScript (AJAX, if you wanna call it that), so they have to convert everything. I’m also running IE7, which adds most of the quirks of the Mozilla engine (stuff like PNG Transparency, proper CSS rendering, native tab support, built-in security), and Maxthon is like a cherry on top of the sundae. I love it!

Anyway, if you’d like an invitation to use this and all later versions of Maxthon 2.0.x Alpha, please leave a comment. I have 10 invitations, but I’ll only give out 5 here (I’m saving the other 5 for other people). Hurry up and comment!