I got accepted into the Trillian Astra public beta tests. I didn't know they had any slots open, but I was surprised to see I could download it that instant.
I've used it now for about 2 solid days, and I have quite a few things I've noticed about it that get me, well, excited about using a chat client. Go ahead and reread that last sentence. I'm excited about a chat client. That means it does one of two things:
1.) It can cook food, do my laundry, and giggle at my jokes.
2.) It's really good at being a chat client and caters needs I didn't know I had.
I think you know which one I'm referring to here.
Trillian Astra is a follow-up to the Trillian 3.x series. Why the added "Astra" name? Because they've completely redesigned the product. Bottom-up.
I've used Trillian for a little over 5 years now, and in that time I've seen it grow from the nifty multi-protocol client with plugin capabilities to a behemoth, slow, ugly, mean-faced app. But Astra fixes that. It fixes it because they've reconsidered how I might actually use the application. They've probably got a couple people who, during UI designs, probably say things like "how do we allow the user to perform x action in under three clicks of the mouse? what about 1?"
The problem that UI designers get into pretty consistently is visual clutter. Oh, you want to have access to a bunch of features at a moment's notice? Okay. We'll slap a button right here. And here. And here. Ooh, we still have some real estate left. Etc. But this isn't very helpful at all, because I really care about having quick access, now RIGHT NOW access. Think about it: I don't want the "sign off" button immediately visible, because I'm clumsy sometimes. Give me a buffer to prevent me from accidentally clicking it. Same thing with my context menus.
Remember when I said that they've completely redesigned the product? They did something I rarely ever see - they redesigned it so well that all of my old habits still actually work. Want to access preferences? Cool, just right-click the titlebar of the contact list and navigate from there. No biggie. Those are the important choices in a ground-up redesign: how do I allow old users to still utilize the same actions they're used to, while giving them new ways to accomplish them?
The other thing I've noticed is that it's FAST. Boot-up is significantly improved over the 3.x series, as is just about every other action I could do. Even opening, closing, and resizing chat windows and the contact list is faster. That's saying something. Especially for a beta. Also, the fact that it properly synced up with the previous installation I had was really nice, because it meant that i didn't have to go changing a bunch of settings. Everything was as it should be.
There's another feature that's been greatly improved upon since 3.x. Trillian used to do a sort of auto-match where you could start typing a screen name and it would jump to it, but it was spotty at best. Their fix? Just start typing while you have the buddy list selected. it'll automatically filter down to the screen names that contain that text string. That's a sweet choice that's all ready been put to good use.
I haven't yet had a chance to test out some of the other funky bells and whistles available. I have been using the Twitter support, however, and it's almost what I want. It displays a small timeline that goes back however far you want it, and then spawns a new chat window when you want to send new tweets. This is now big deal, except that what I really want is the entire thing to display in a single chat window. Make me feel like I'm almost in a chat room. The XMPP support Twitter had for a while is almost exactly what I'm thinking of.
The only other gripe I have is that the tabs at the top of the chat window containers are huge. Seriously huge. If they were smaller (like they were in previous versions), this would not be an issue, but right now, they're a little large for my tastes. Then again, it's designed so well that the loss in screen real estate really doesn't seem like that big of a deal any more.
After 2 days of using the Astra Beta, I have to say I'm extremely impressed. I actually will not return to 3.x like I was expecting to, because this is all ready stable enough, fast enough, and feature-rich enough to replace the old one.
If you want to check out more, go hit up the Trillian astra site. You can find much more information there.
As always, have a good one!