Trillian IM client being ported to OS X - private alpha testing begins

While it's pretty hard to imagine why they'd bother, Cerulean Studios is porting Trillian, their wildly successful Windows multi-IM client, to OS X. How will Trillian (a commercial product) compete against Adium (a free product), particularly considering that Adium is a number of years ahead of Trillian on the Mac, and is by all accounts a very strong multi-IM implementation? As someone who used Trillian for a number of years in Windows, I can say that Adium has completely met my instant-messaging needs on my Mac. I'm what you might call a heavy IM user, with 6 accounts that I use regularly.

Now, to be fair, Cerulean Studios states that this is in fact not a port at all, but a ground-up reimplementation of Trillian. The teaser screenshot on their announcement page is certainly intriguing. From the announcement:

Though this first alpha build of the OS X version of Trillian is still very preliminary and minimal - the functionality pulled through is about the same as the Flash-based web version - the code for every single feature on the Windows version is there in the underlying mediums. As the UI is expanded, those features will become available. The OS X version will be playing catch-up to the Windows one for a while yet, however.

Currently it appears that test versions are only being offered to testers of the current Windows-based Trillian Astra. Click through to the announcement page if you'd like to sign up to test Trillian on your Mac.

View Tags

Source: http://blog.ceruleanstudios.com/?p=205

Categories

Software Switchers Internet Internet Tools

While it's pretty hard to imagine why they'd bother, Cerulean Studios is porting Trillian, their wildly successful Windows multi-IM client,...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

41 Comments

Filter by:

perfidia

Pardon my french here, but where the phuck is the Trillian link for downloading its software? For I see it not.

November 12 2007 at 8:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Marta

I love Trillian! It's great! One of the first applications I install on a virgin computer. I also love that you can change skin to make it super small and compact, not a big, bloated monster with ugly graphics.
Only problem I've had is that the pro version doesn't work from behind our firewall at work. I've reported this issue many times without any resolution. Now I'm hoping Trillian will be available for the iPhone too....?

October 09 2007 at 12:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

paul

Adium has completely met your needs? Obviously you don't use webcams. There's really no excuse for finding a fix for this, whatever it takes.

October 08 2007 at 12:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Andy

Video/voice is not important to me, but what would be important is OTR encryption. I encourage Trillian to adopt OTR for seemless interoperability with libpurple clients.

October 08 2007 at 10:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Max Shanly

As per usual the Trillian team have taken it upon them selves to just ruin the entire UI of an operating system. For some reason they cannot stick to the basic guidelines for an application, trying to make it look unique when it actually turns out ugly. Just stick to the OS' UI, it looks much better than what you have now.

October 08 2007 at 4:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Paul

We want video!

October 08 2007 at 2:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

nick

One thing Trillian has going for it is IRC support. I really wish Adium would support IRC. As a paid user of Trillian and an avid OS X user, I couldn't happier. Welcome Cerrulian and I for one look forward to the competition.

October 07 2007 at 11:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tim in tampa

I love Adium, but there are a lot of features I'm forced to run Parallels to get (webcams, photo sharing, etc) and if Trillian can implement those, I'd jump all over it.

October 07 2007 at 5:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sam

I can't believe all the negative comments here - we should all be happy that another developer is taking notice of Macs and taking the time to try to develop something for it.

And you can't really knock trillian OSX for being "bloated" or "ugly" when it hasn't even been released yet and is only in alpha.

Personally, if Trillian brings video chat for AIM, I'm in. My macbook pro has that little isight camera on it, but I never get to use it with Adium.

Both programs are great, and I look forward to trying trillian on my mac.

October 07 2007 at 3:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Macskeeball

@Eric f. (#30): The last time I used it, Yahoo Messenger for Mac is actually well done. It used to be terrible, but they redid it from scratch a little over a year ago and it turned out sort of Adium-ish. Find a screenshhot if you don't believe me.

October 07 2007 at 12:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply