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.

Chatterboxes of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your inability to IM from your iPhone. Cerulean Studios, maker of the popular Trillian multi-service IM client for Windows, is hard at work on the next version -- Trillian Astra, which in addition to being cross-platform will also include a full web interface to all of the social networking features present in the standalone app.

A wee birdie (thanks Victor) pointed us to this post on the Trillian Astra dev blog, which shows an interesting version of the TA web access portal. Seems that the code monkeys are psyched to do a carefully-designed Trillian Astra portal that is tuned to Safari for iPhone's specs... nice. Go ahead and sign up as an alpha tester if you wish, and do tell them that you are an iPhone owner, but note that it will be a few weeks before the iPhone UI is ready for test.