Trillian Astra Exclusive Preview

Augh. Put a break after the images in the article, please! ;) That said...

Most other things didn't really change much, I'll give Cerulean that it is only in Alpha, but I would have much preferred it to be rewritten entirely, instead of adding/changing Trillian 3.x.

I'm a little puzzled by this comment. It... pretty much /is/ a complete rewrite. That's why it took so long, and is in alpha right now. We spent all that time more or less starting over: now it takes up far less memory, it's faster and smaller.

Just as one example, every medium has been redone from scratch around a new system called 'IMCore' -- rather than each medium being responsible for its own networking, encryption, profile management, etc., IMCore handles that for all mediums. Thus each medium just has to implement the protocol parser and generator, and IMCore handles much of the work for you. If we find a bug in SSL code or add support for a new proxy system, IMCore is changed and all mediums immediately pick it up.

Sure, things like the preferences panel, things like that, have been kept as much like 3.1 as possible in appearance (even where settings inside those have changed), specifically to keep things familiar to users.

It's still an under-development alpha, so a lot of things (audio/video chatting, etc.) aren't back in as we flesh out the IMCore implementations of things. But, given that we entirely redid most of the core codebase over the course of a year and a half or so... thus the long release... while trying to keep it backwards compatible as much as possible in terms of skinning language and plugin API... I'm not sure how much more we could've done in the way of rewriting it! :)

But, yes, many of the new features are built around the Astra profile, as the write-up at the Trillian Astra preview
shows. For instance, you can log onto a Trillian copy in a 'guest mode' which then pulls down your contact list and any other stuff you've stored on the Astra servers, runs a session, and -- when you log out -- cleans up the files again afterwards. Useful for logging in on a friend's computer when at someone else's house! Things like that.

I notice that these screenshots don't seem to be logged into the Astra service itself, which is one of the most significant changes to the system in this alpha. You can make social information available about yourself in the Trillian Astra program, and the Astra service shares this information out in a number of different ways. (And, of course, each element of the information can be locked down to specific security levels, like 'everyone' or 'just my friends' and so on.) Widgets exist that can be shared right in your Astra message windows, as well as on websites, to share status and mood and so on.

It's a little disappointing to see a 'preview' which didn't even bother to look at one of the more unique/interesting features of Astra, the social presence integration and the account synchronization.

I didn't take these screenshots personally, but the person who did them for me was telling me how he was having some troubles getting it to connect to your servers. He was behind a firewall/proxy, however, so that could have made a difference. And I completely agree, these don't highlight some of the newer, better, Astra Profie features. Maybe if I could get an invitation to join the alpha myself I could do another article or an update and feature the Astra profile. (spike -at- bigblueball -dot- com) ;)

And you know something, I do believe you. It's just when all of the non-Astra features look pretty damn similar to the 3.x series, I was a little skeptical at first. Good to hear it straight from the source, though, thanks. I'll fix the article straightaway.

In 3.1, a lot of the slowdown was in the skin /engine/. In 4.0, the amount of glitz/flash in the skin itself determines speed. Cordonata should be reasonably fast on a moderate-level machine, but Cobalt (for instance) which is also installed will be much, much faster.

If you find Cobalt is running slower for you than 3.1, it *really* should not be; if so, PLEASE log into Bugzilla with your alpha account and log a bug with some performance and system info? It's conceivable there are situations that affect skin performance which we haven't found or fixed, but we'll need info to track those down. This is why it's an alpha, after all. :)

A lot of the right-click contact options will be returning; due to it being alpha (and the mediums having been restarted from scratch), stuff's still being fleshed back out.