Astra - The Future of Trillian
The newest member of the Trillian family is not overly far from public release but can it stand the test of being competitive with today’s messenger software?
Upon clicking the Setup.exe, I found the installation and upgrade from my previous version of Trillian both easy and quick with it easily importing my settings from Trillian 3.1. However not everything was as smooth as I hoped. After starting up Astra, I noticed that while it managed to connect all my accounts, bar taking a while to do so, it wouldn’t connect my ICQ account, I scratched my head and checked to see what had happened and apparently it’s forgotten my ICQ account, removing all references from it in the Identities and Connections Menu.
A bit of an annoying thing due to not remembering my ICQ number. This was eventually resolved by looking into my ICQ Logs. The next issue I came across was that initially it wouldn’t send my messages, telling me that it could not send them. I restarted Astra, and this promptly resolved the issue.
The guys at Cerulean Studios have obviously been trying to close the gap between the lack of features Trillian supports of MSN and other Messenger Networks. And it shows, Trillian Astra allows for drawing, Emotiblips, Buzzing (Oh yay), and a few other features which haven’t either been used or utilized in Trillian previous versions. Sadly, however, Trillian does not have proper support for Webcam at this time — the lack of this feature is astonishing in that this is probably the most sought out feature in Trillian. There are settings for the feature, however they are greyed out, and I can only imagine that it is something Cerulean Studios are working on and will probably be implemented before actual release.
Astra’s range of skins are limited at the moment, however look quite decent with a large amount of colours to use. However using some of these skin colours will mean the Drawing feature will not appear properly and is something Cerulean need to work on.
On the bright side, Trillian’s strongest point has always been the range of plug-ins, and Astra has backward compatibility with a large quantity of them, with this and that there will undoubtedly be many plug-ins made especially for Astra, I can only imagine that the range of plug-ins will be vast. Including usage of Gtalk, MySpace and Xfire which are all currently available and work well with Astra.
All in all, if the guys at Cerulean Studios keep working hard on this, this will be undoubtedly the best Multi-Client Messenger yet with near-complete interoperability.
Pros:
+ Skins really do load faster.
+ Less memory usage.
+ Much faster redrawing time.
+ Visually attractive.
+ Backward support with older plug-ins.
Cons:
- No properly implemented webcam feature.
- Needs better compatibility for the drawing feature with it’s own skins.
Trillian Astra 4.0.0.52 was used for this review which is in fact, A closed
Alpha version.
One thing you neglect to mention is the fact that the software you are reviewing is an alpha version, and a closed alpha version at that. Astra isn’t at a beta stage or release stage yet.
Due to this, the program still lacks a lot of features, but this is by design. By reducing the features, it results in a much more focused testing phase on what is actually there.
You’re quite right, it is a tad silly of me not to include the fact it is in it’s Alpha. However, I’m trying to stress this is how Astra is currently — Because undoubtedly it will get better, more features will be added, and functions will be superior to what they are now.
I’m just interested in the growth and development of Astra in comparison to it’s previous versions.
Good to see a new version of Trillian is coming!
I really hope they make the option to disable all those annoying features (buzzing/nudging/sounds/etc) very easy to find.
Have you tried it under Vista, and if so - is there a way to skin it so that it adopts the Windows style, with glass-effect borders, and such?
I’d love a way to dock an IM client to the gadget bar too.
There are options to disable the Buzzing sounds and sounds overall.
So those annoying sounds can be no longer be.
I haven’t been able to try it under Vista yet, however there doesn’t seem to be an option for adopting a window style …yet. However, that said, for the two skins provided thus far, there seems to be 27 Themes for each. So there’s quite a variety of colours. I can only imagine that it’s skinning will include more themes and possibly even a way to adopt the Windows style but as of yet, no.
Sadly, docking thus far is limited to both the left and right sides, but I would like seeing it being able to dock to the gadget bar as well.
Shouldn’t that be 0.4 BUILD 52 not 4.0.0.52 ?
Or am I severely mistaken ?
It’s 4.0.0.52.
It’s meant to indicate the next version of Trillian, after Trillian 3/.1.