We are not great fans of desktop IM apps as we can get it inside the browser like imo.im for Google Chrome and Yoono add-on for Firefox. Yet we downloaded Trillian 4 some months back and instantly disappointed by it’s user interface and performance and Pidgin is remained our desktop IM app for years.Today we decided to try Trillian 5 beta because the screenshots features a much improved GUI and tons of new features are found in Trillian 5 beta home.The application is just 12.27 MB of size. For now alternate download locations cannot be found.The new features on the web site gives a feeling that Trillian is not only just an app for chatting but also trying to become our all in one social networks hub.To find the truth we clicked on this link and got the app.
Installation and adding Identities
The installation was just two clicks on the next button. After that you have to register to Trillian to use this app, we had username and password from our last installation so logging in was just fine.
Now we added our Gtalk/Gmail username and passwords. We have different usernames for Gtalk and Gmail, both just refused to connect at first. We can’t figure out the problem first but when we logged out from imo.im web page from Chrome everything was fine.We got email notifications, chat screen with emoticons.
As you can see above the smiley collection is huge and beautiful and extra objects and symbols are also available.One very good feature we found was the contacts on one Gtalk account can be added to another Gtalk account by just one click, using this we can abandon our one account forever :-). The chat window style is changed as never seen before as chat messages appear on right and left sides of the window.Chat history is available as a notepad file by clicking on the history button.Recording of activities can be disabled from preferences. The more button has every option to fine tune the chatting experience.
Other Social Networks
Trillian supports many popular networks. This functionality is achieved by many plug-ins but we don’t have to select the plug-in manually when we add an account the plug-in starts automatically.
Among these options we tested Twitter and Facebook accounts.Adding these accounts was easy, one authentication window pops up and click on allow button and we are in.As of Twitter and Facebook experience the user interface is customizable to the core. We can add Twitter newsbots searches and ignored users to separate lists.Notifications for new tweets, @replies and even trending topics are displayed as popup messages. Twitter and Facebook icons are available on the taskbar, clicking on the icons brings up an interface from where we can do almost anything.
Reply or retweet from the message itself. Url shortening with bit.ly account is supported by entering username and API key in the settings.If you feel too lazy to click outside your browser window just reply from this pop up.
These excellent features are enough to not log into these sites from a web browser.Windows 7 users can check in to fousquare with GPS support.A ribbon menu of social networks adds beauty to the Trillian interface and it’s useful too. Switching between compact and full interfaces are just a click away. Thus it can fit on any small sized screen.The memory footprint of this app was surprisingly small.
Verdict
To write about all of the features of Trillian 5 beta is just out of scope of this simple blog but we can just describe this app in one word that is excellent. The changes in this version is too good it is not just a design change but just changing the focus of developers to social networks from just instant messaging.
Recommended:
(We are not yet uninstalling pidgin, we will download it as a portable app instead from here)
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