New Trillian alpha available for the Mac

Trillian sucked when Astra came out. Resource hog, obnoxious interface.

Digsby and Adium have both done what I love, no nonsense, feature rich and slim UI.

Trillian should just start from scratch in my opinion.

Cerulean Studios has delivered too little, too late. It's a shame, I used to be a huge fan of theirs and spent years carrying a torch hoping that they would move to Mac so that I could move literally years worth of logfiles over from my old PC. Adium isn't perfect, but Trillian no longer holds my interest. For the people who are still excited, I hope that Trillian continues to deliver for you what you're looking for. But I am absolutely done with Cerulean Studios myself. Their UI is so 2001 and they spent such an obscenely long time working on Astra that they're completely behind the times now. Blizzard got away with this with Starcraft (and is continuing to, damn them) but Cerulean Studios screwed up. At least I think they did, I know they still have a fan base out there.

Trillian for OS X is great. It's stable and offers incredible features for an alpha like file transfers or receiving a buddy's font-style. In my opinion it is just yet far better than Adium. Your experience completely depends on the IM protocol you are most using. For me, this is ICQ and regarding this protocol Adium is a real mess. While you can't receive your buddy's font-style in a normal chat, in a group chat you can - with the limitation you can't see your contacts' names. Also, you can't send files to anyone behind a firewall and there are massive problems adding, deleting and ignoring buddies and - some time ago - there were even problems sending and receiving messages particularly when invisible or offline. Instead of fixing the existing bugs, the Adium developers concentrate on adding new features such as twitter support, which - I feel - is a real shame.

This article also isn't good in any way. It's absolutely subjective while the author didn't test the programm extensively (with a single protocol, I suspect?) and didn't read the Information Cerulean Studios provided (like the limitations this alpha has). Let's take this statement for example:

"The most glaring of the missing features is no group chat support, which will be a turnoff for many."

No, this will be a turnoff for few, not for many. This feature may be important for you but many people don't really need it. Look at this poll for example:

http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/forums/showthread.php?p=802284

As you can see, this is the least requested feature of all.

In my opinion you should rewrite this article to contain either a more objective test or no test at all.

If u got mac u shud be using Adium..best chat client

I'm sick of Cerulean Studios, which is a shame, because I used to be such a fanboy for them.

I used Trillian back in the day. I do believe my first version was either 0.5(something high) or 0.6(something low). I used probably every iteration up and through 3.0.

I donated, AND, bought Trilly Pro when it came out. And watched as the development time seemed to slow to an absolute crawl.

I bought Trillian for the iPhone... it's unexciting, confusing at times, and their "Astra" chat network is just... totally unnecessary. I'm not anti-chat networks, private ones are totally legitimate. But don't we have enough public ones now? What does Astra provide that no others do?

Per my response to Sam above there, I mean what I said. This is an alpha, that they've teased for way too long now.
I've watched their blog, I've watched their releases, and their development time is just painfully long, and the release doesn't make up for that. There's so much more to do, and if the development cycle this far is any indication, we don't know when TrillyMac 1.0 will be here.

Cerulean has a certain brand of slickness that I adore. But I adored it on Windows. A sleek UI on an otherwise boring interface. That's not really a problem in the Mac world though.

Cerulean was so much better than the competitors back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, or whenever it was, my sense of time sucks. Nowadays? Not really finding anything stand out.

Good for you, for those who use it, but the Duck is in my Dock and I'm not looking back.

I do not normally criticize the journalism choices made at TUAW, but I think reviewing an alpha is completely inappropriate.

I notice you did not mention crashes -- that is amazing for an alpha.

Missing features? It's an alpha. Buddy icon transfer? That will come.

Report the bugs you find. And have better policies. Do not review alpha software.

It is Cerulean Studios policy to not release software until it is ready. They probably made an exception due to the excitement of the Mac community.

Reviewing it was really bad form.

--Sam

Keep in mind, Megan, that this is the very first public Alpha (not even Beta), and that Cerulean Studios stated on their blog exactly what features were and were not included in this release. There is also mention of the fact that all of the included features might not work depending on your individual system set up as a result of how early a version this is.

Way back when I was a PC user, Trillian was my chat client of choice and for good reason. I've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Trillian on the Mac, and while this first release is pretty barebones, it worked exactly as advertised for me. Obviously it's not feature-complete enough to use on a day-to-day basis yet, but that will come with time.

The point is, Trillian has the potential to be every bit as great on the Mac as its PC counterpart, and it's a bit silly to judge it so harshly when it's at such an early stage of development. Granted, you mention at the end that you agree this potential exists, but I feel as though the focus here shifted from an announcement about the Alpha to a full-fledged software review.

Used to like Trill on PC, but Adium on Mac is a real gem. 25 bucks for all features on Windows? What the @#$!%? Does it do your laundry for you or what?

Will Trillian allow me to videochat well with PC users of Trillian? Or is there a better solution somewhere else for videochatting with the PC folks?

I always think it's funny when people judge software in its alpha state or complain about missing alpha features.