PC users are well aware of Cerulean Studios’ excellent Trillian instant messaging client. To the Mac users that haven’t heard of Trillian before, it’s pretty much the Adium of the PC world. Cerulean has begun development on their next generation client named Trillian Astra. The best part is that it will be available on both PC and Mac.
Astra is currently only in the alpha phase of development so don’t get too excited just yet. However, I do await its release as it goes far beyond any traditional instant messaging client, if that’s even the right word to describe Astra. Unique features include a web-based interface with chat capabilities, RSS news delivered to your IM window, drag-n-drop image sharing in IM windows and file transfer that works (I’m looking at you Adium!).
These features are all fine and dandy, but what really caught my attention was Buzz – and maybe it’s just me because that’s the name of the GaTech mascot…
By popular request, Trillian Astra now supports the “buzz” feature of many other IM clients. Buzzing your contact is an incredibly annoying way to quickly get their attention. We apologize in advance for coding this.
Initial news of Trillian Astra development broke a few months ago in November. Cerulean Studios revamped a development blog last week for users to keep up to date on all the Astra happenings.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
A bloat application for sure. But, the eyecandy is superb though.
Trillian Astra also has an accompanying web client that works on both the Mac and Windows.
@Kyle:
Wowzers!!! That’s some nice eye candy for Trillian…. I just might be ok, if I ever have to start using Windows again….
Ima have to hook it up with my adiumx skin, converted ;)
BTW Paul, try the beta of Adium. File transfer has apparently been fixed.. a lot.
Hmm actually, just wait till Thursday ;)
I see some glimpses of Kopete in the new features. Good developments though.
I think MSN Messenger has some sort of “buzz” feature as well. That’s one of the main reason I’m glad I don’t use it anymore :)
Im new to this, can i use my gtalk account for this one?
Do you think that the real application – I mean the native application, not the Web app – really supports the Mac? That was new for me. Where have you read about this?
@Sebastian – that was one of the things I was unclear about, which is why I left it open to interpretation. =)
Ha ha :) Maybe we should ask them. It is always talked about Win32. Even in the ChangeLogs. There was a petition somewhere online to make Trillian available on Mac. I really hope for such a thing. Even if Adium is not that bad, the library used by them, libgaim, is not even comparable to the featureset trillian’s cross-protocol wrapper seems to have. They even support Video chats on MSN and Yahoo etc. (even in the current released version).
Actually Sebastian, I remembered why I thought it was OS X-compatible..at the base of Trillian Astra is something called IMCore which their Astra site says:
But maybe they were just being general about IMCore, not Astra as a whole. Well, here’s to an OS X version. :-D
They’ve been talking about it for so long I’ve lost all interest until it’s a beta, or released at least.
Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie!!!!
I’m excited! Trillian is already very useful and has a ton of features, Astra looks to be ten times better.
“A bloat application for sure.” – Ncus, it’s not bloat. It’s one application that replaces at least 6 others… I’d much rather have this one that works very fast and is advertisement-free over 6 different applications.
Trillian Astra has many new features and looks great. A lot of hard work has been put into this project and this should be a great successor of version 3. As far as it goes for the MAC version, there is only the web version avalaible. There is no further updates from the developers about any installable for the MAC. As many individuals out there, I have both a MAC and a PC. I would love to use Astra on my MAC. Hopefully CS releases an installable version of Astra for MAC’s. Currently testing Astra on PC and using Adium for MAC.
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