Trillian Astra – Expanded
Trillian Astra, now I’m well aware that a brief article has already been started on its subject matter but with this I hope to expand on what Jon was originally trying to touch upon.
Both Jon and myself have been using Trillian Astra as our primary IM’ing software for the good part of a week now and in that time we’ve both discovered features which we definitely weren’t expecting. Touching on a point Jon made originally, Trillian is extremely good with its memory usage. It constantly clears its memory usage and even in extended use with multiple accounts running I’ve rarely seen Trillian use more than 30mb in memory usage generally idling at around 20mb.
A little feature I’m glad has been implemented is the docking and auto hide feature. Rather than having to constantly hunt around for the IM client such as I have had to do in the past with AIM and MSN respectively I’ve been able to dock the Trillian client to the right of my screen and auto-hide it bring it back into view simply by floating to the right edge of my screen to bring it back. I’m well aware that both previous IM Clients may have included these features but I certainly don’t recall stumbling on them myself.
Another interesting feature is how Trillian Astra goes about implementing the history. You can sort through a calendar to find conversations you’ve had with specific contacts, sorting through months days and years. Within these days it also includes a graph of sorts to show what time of day your conversation went about. I like the concept but it does make one wonder what the real purpose is for it.
One can also create an Astra profile which other users with Trillian Astra can view. This page can be customised via widgets but it can be customised to show which chat services you use within Trillian Astra, you age, sex, relationship status and location. There are sub branches under this as well which include a wall where you can basically add your widgets which include world clocks, the local weather, dictionary.com word of the day and others.
I’ve noticed that there are certainly more options and it seems to be more integrated towards Facebook rather than Myspace. The options and features certainly favour Facebook in terms of it providing updates in status, the ability to poke with the client whereas Myspace’s integration only goes as far as being able to chat with those currently logged into Myspace.
It’s also nice to see Trillian begin to include features within this version that were pay to use in previous versions such as the video functions. What with the gradual progression in IM’ing clients it has become a necessity to provide such services for free to be able to compete with the competition.
It will also be interesting to see how easily the average computer user will be able to deal with Trillian as it can appear daunting at first although it definitely helps you every step of the way to get what you need done. The implimentation of plug-ins is a brilliant feature which allows one to set up RSS feeds through Trillian or a fully featured audio player. There are a vast array of plug-ins available to keep things fresh although I’d be interested to see if these features will be available within the free version of Trillian or just within the version you have to pay for.
My one major niggle with Trillian Astra seems to be its inability to remember to auto-connect to my accounts. Although set it seems to reset these options to default although I have yet to hear Jon complain of similar issues so perhaps its just me.
There are certainly one or two bugs that still need ironing out, but certainly do not allow these small issues put you off what is otherwise an Instant Messenger clearly in a class of its own. Be sure to keep an eye out as a Web version has recently been released and a Mac and Iphone version should be appearing on the scene in the not too distant future!
Check it out here.
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