Trillian Astra

I pretty much hate every official IM client because it's usually bloated with ads, and apparently thinks that you like to play flash games while chatting (I'm talking 'bout you - icq), but clients such as Trillian, Miranda and Pidgin (Adium on MacOS) make IMing worth your while. The support for multiple IM accounts makes you available to everybody, and everything is integrated in only one program, fairly less resource hungry and ad free. Perfect.

I am a big fan of Trillian, but the v3 that served my needs for a while quickly got replaced (due to my uncontrollable urge of curiosity towards new software) with Trillian Astra - an alpha version of Trillian IM. For an alpha version, it runs fairly quickly and steadily (although I have to bare with the fact that it crashes about two times in a month, for no apparent reason). One of the key benefits - it looks beautiful. No excessive smileys or hippie-like color mixes... Just plain old IM. Also, the built in effects go great Windows Vista! Oh, and there's the iChat behaviour that I like - chat bubbles!

If you can't get a hold of Trillian Astra just yet, I'm sure you can get one from a torrent somewhere out there (wink wink)... But seriosuly, I think the Trillian crew at Cerulean studios won't mind you testing their alpha version outside the official alpha program, after all, it's in their best interest to get that thing done with as few bugs as possible. So if you are willing to take a different approach to IM, be sure to go for Astra.

Add comment April 9th, 2008