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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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Truegod said 7:15PM on 10-06-2007
Personally I have to say, ughhh. I used to be a Windows / Trillian user and one of the main reasons I switched to OS X was because of Adium X. But to each his own. I guess I'm glad there will be competition in the OS X IM client market. Ever since Fire stopped development there hasn't been much.
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Chad Z said 7:19PM on 10-06-2007
I'll stick with "the Duck".
(Adium for those who didn't get it).
cz
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kleinias said 7:26PM on 10-06-2007
I use Adium and I like it, that being said, I'm typically a fan of competition in the market. There are plenty of examples where even products that are free are forced to continually innovate due to other products in the market. Also, I always thought that Trillian had a free version to go along with their paid version. If that is still the case it would negate one of the (frankly, pretty tenuous) arguments in this blog-post for Trillian to not enter the OS X market.
Finally, I'm always amazed when I read something that says "While it's pretty hard to imagine why they'd bother" about a new competitor entering an already established market. This has been uttered plenty of times, sometimes it's true, but often its not.
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Jeff said 7:48PM on 10-06-2007
I'm not a big fan of Trillian.
I wonder what Apple thinks of them using their "I'm a Mac" adverts for their own promotional material.
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Ondra Soukup said 7:53PM on 10-06-2007
The UI so far ? Where do I vomit please ? I'd love to not make mess this time ://
We're on Mac here, not some cyborg ship....
it's ugly and doesn't meet apple's UI guidelines in any way, just my 2 cents
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Gunnar said 7:54PM on 10-06-2007
Well,
Trillian is not based on gaim or pidgin how it's called nowadays. It brings some new functionality that Adium can't offer, like Voice Chat and easy Filetransfer (still doesn't work well for me with genuine ICQ Clients).
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Danny said 8:33PM on 10-06-2007
I have the same opinion as you, Jason. I have used Trillian many times in Windows only to find myelf almost as frustrated as I am when I (rarely) use Microsoft's official client. Why they'd bother competing against the IM superpower that is Adium is beyond me.
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Sam Katz said 8:45PM on 10-06-2007
You people miss the point. Trillian's entire interface is written in XML (and is thus a skin). If you don't like the interface, change it. This may or may not be true in the final shipping version.
With each release, it's gotten better. They have a brilliant dev team, and they've licensed their protocol implementations to other vendors, been given updates by Microsoft, fought a battle with AOL, and helped GAIM regain AIM support. Do not underestimate the software or the company. You can add IM services easily -- it supports almost any.
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Chris Gardner said 8:53PM on 10-06-2007
These comments are interesting because I happen to use both as well, and I fully expected to read comments saying that Trillian was better than the Adium trainwreck. I've often found Adium's support of services flaky compared to Trillian and there's flat out more features in the latter. But to each his own, I guess.
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Merlyn3D said 9:25PM on 10-06-2007
AdiumX can connect and send files to most IM networks, but that's about it. For years Trillian has actually worked to bring audio/video capabilities to its program on each of the networks it supports, plus it's totally skinnable, totally pluginable, and the beauty of this new version (Trillian Astra) is that they will now sync your "Astra Profile" with the cloud so that you can log in to an almost meebo-like interface and have all your networks and settings there. It's almost like "the duck" can fly now! :)
I've been alpha testing the windows version of Astra, and while it's in its infancy it's still pretty neat. While I love adium, I wildly look forward to Trillian on OS X because it will bring many of it's features to OS X which Adium lacks.
Plus, Adium shouldn't be the only duck in the pond.
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Merlyn3D said 9:29PM on 10-06-2007
I forgot to add, that "meebo-like" interface means you can log in to astra anywhere that you can use a browser like Safari or Firefox in addition to the clients for Windows or OS X. Plus they have a web 2.0 app for the iphone that I would imagine does this as well.
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Mark 2000 said 9:34PM on 10-06-2007
Trillian's best feature is its plugins. Adium's functionality is at the whim of its makers and frankly they can be very boar headed about feature requests. But Trillian's plugins are dll based, so they probably aren't cross platform...
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Sparks said 10:26PM on 10-06-2007
Actually, all of our internal plugins (at least, anything labeled version 4.0) are able to compile on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
For third-party plugins, the API to speak between the plugin and the core will remain the same. (Plugin functionality is part of the core, rather than the system-specific UI.) So once things are further along, the intent /is/ to release guides on how to port other third-party plugins over.
As for why the OS X version is happening? Originally, 'twas an experiment. Though we develop on Windows, I am an OS X user/developer (and a regular TUAW reader) in my own day-to-day personal computer use. This was an attempt to test the portability of the core in a practical manner, but has turned into something more largely because we *constantly* get requests submitted for an OS X version.
As for the rest, friendly competition -- emphasis on friendly -- is good. I like to think we can keep it friendly: we've contributed code out of Trillian to libpurple before, after all. And we've seen plenty of Trillian's features (metacontacts, instant lookup, etc.) borrowed for other clients, and I personally think the IM community is better as a whole for that. :)
Rachel Blackman
Cerulean Studios, LLC.
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Bryan Hughes said 10:27PM on 10-06-2007
This is long overdue and gives Adium some deserved competition.
I like Adium, but the potential for growth simply isn't there. They continue to cite how they can't offer things like video and voice chat due to pidgin (formerly gaim), which is where instant messaging is headed. In addition, the Trillian team is constantly innovating and looking for new ways to make IMing better.
All in all, the Mac community should be very excited about this news. I, for one, am ready to embrace Trillian once its becomes available.
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Chris said 10:39PM on 10-06-2007
Hi Rachel, can you contact me?
http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/the_tick
Chris Forsythe
Adium Project Manager
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Chris Coleman said 10:58PM on 10-06-2007
Thanks, but no thanks. We've got Adium.
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Nick said 11:13PM on 10-06-2007
I don't understand the mentality that Cerulean Studios shouldn't bother producing a Mac version of Trillian simply because "we already have Adium".
In my experience with Adium (and I do use it as my primary IM app on my Mac) is that while it's decent, it's severely lacking in places like file transfer and lack of support for video. Adium leaves a lot to be desired.
If Trillian Astra ends up being as good as it looks, I'll happily pay forward for a "Pro" version with enhanced features. It's worth it, IMHO.
...And for those of us who are content with Adium - that's completely fine. But competition is *always* good, so you'll benefit as well.
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Chris said 11:39PM on 10-06-2007
Nick, did you file any tickets about these issues? Besides voice and video I mean. If you didn't, we can't be expected to fix them. Half of the time we don't see the problems.
For instance, I've been direct connecting all night long with people with no issue, and file transfer works flawlessly for me. This is also true for the Lead Developer. We can't fix issues we don't have information about and that we can't reproduce.
Chris Forsythe
Adium Project Manager
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vrn said 11:43PM on 10-06-2007
My god. Asinine people like those rearing their heads here (starting with Jason Clarke) are why I'm ashamed to say I use a Mac to my Windows-loving family.
"We've already got Adium so why do we need Trillian?" Well, let's turn that around: "We've already got Windows, why do we need Mac OS?"
Oh, suddenly the defense force wakes up? Same reasons, people - competition is great, especially when it comes to encouraging progress in features.
Things I can do on my Bootcamped Vista/Trillian install I can't do on my Tiger/AdiumX machine include voice chatting and video calling. Show me a third-party IM client that does that for three networks on the Mac.
Be open-minded. Try to think different, perhaps? Is that too much to ask? Or is it "pretty hard to imagine why" you'd bother to do that, eh Jason?
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Nick said 11:52PM on 10-06-2007
Hi Chris.
The problems I've been having with file transfers in Adium occur when transferring files to AIM users, while transfers will take a long time to being or sometimes fail during transfer. I assumed that these issues were the same ones acknowledged here. However, you bring up a good point and I should be tracking any issues I have and looking to submit a report.
Also, I may have been to harsh with Adium. I use Adium because I vastly prefer it to iChat, and I'm grateful to the developers (and yourself) for making it available. My post was primarily directly at those here who seemed to be *against* Trillian coming to the Mac. :)
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