Okay, I’m an IM junkie, and I’ll admit it. I’ve got 1-2-3-4-5-6, no 7 AIM accounts, and I use maybe 2-3 on a regular basis. I’ve got 3 MSN accounts, 2 Yahoo! accounts, an ICQ account (only a 7 digit UIN, too!) and sometimes I talk on IRC, too. My system tray has been cursed for years with bearing the burden caused by this extreme need I have to communicate. Then along came Trillian. No more ads, no more hassles of switching between accounts or even instant messaging systems. Who cares if my friend uses Yahoo!, AIM, or MSN? It’s all good, and all in one little program that I can customize to the hilt. It’s completely free, skinnable, I can make it transparent, it keeps track of my conversations for me, and it has about a hundred smileys to mess with. Some even have sounds to go with the smiley! I can do functions like global away, which sets all my accounts to away, without having to go through the arduous process of clicking on each individual tray icon and selecting an appropriate message. I still get to keep my buddy alert sounds, like the cash register that tells me my girlfriend is online (cha-ching!), and I also get new stuff like SecureIM, which is like AIM’s Direct Connect, but more secure. I’ve never been so impressed with a chat program before in my entire life. And did I mention it’s free? I love this thing!!!
I highly recommend this program to anyone who uses Instant Messaging with any frequency.
I don’t have nearly as many IM accounts as you, abel, but essentially the same situation and peeves. For various reasons, I have to monitor MSN, AIM, and Odigo at times. I recently learned about Trillian, but wanted to hear more about it before I took the time to try it out. So I’m glad you started this thread. Think I’ll pull up a comfy chair and wait to see what everybody else thinks.
It certainly does more right than it does wrong. I’ve been using it off and on for a month or 2 now. Overall, it does the job. I dont remember the last time I actually got a message on anything other than Messenger though. The rest are allways on now anyway. So if somebody I haven’t talked to in years that still may happen to have me on thier ICQ(my first number was only 6 digits)…nah…never happen. Anyway, my beef with Trillian is that for some reason, if I let it stay open for a day or 2 (cable rules) it suddenly becomes a CPU hog, taking over every bit CPU time not used by other programs. Not unlike what morpheus would do when morpheus was still morpheus and not some lame gnuttella program. So I kill Trillian. I turn MSN Messenger on (it always ends up in the systray anyway because of hotmail) and dont turn Trillian back on until I reboot. I dont IM even close to what I used to. I do IRC, but I never bothered to set it up for that. So, bottum line, Trillian may be great for a lot of people but to some… <shrug> its just another program. Oh, I forgot to mention one of the best parts about Trillian. It will save you a TON of RAM if you ussually do run a bunch of different IM’s. The log’s are nice too.
dead0man
It is indeed pretty decent, and you don’t have to fight the silly thing to keep it from popping ads and such at you. From time to time, it and AOL get into a cyclical battle where AOL tweaks its side to block out access to it (they want people to only use AIM, and people–those contrary critters–don’t seem to agree with that), Trillian patches to a new version to get around that, AOL tweaks again, Trillian patches, etc. These little contest spasms usually last for a few weeks or so, then die out.
dead0man, you can kill MSN so it doesn’t pop up every time you open hotmail. Just open up Preferences/Options and uncheck the “Run as a background service” and “Run when Windows starts” boxes. I use Hotmail all the time and it hasn’t popped up since I did that. Oh, and btw… a 6 digit UIN? I’m not actually as in love with my UIN as I may have seemed, but that’s pretty cool.
Wisest Novel, I haven’t used mIRC very much, so I can’t compare Trillian’s functions with it. I think Trillian has a list of features on their website… let me check… here ya go http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/features.html. I doubt that it supports everything mIRC does, but it definitely gets the job done.
Just piping in with an “I love Trillian” vote, too. The only prob I have with it is that it’s hard to tell which smileys will transfer to Yahoo vs. MSN if the other person is not running Trillian as well. (I am working on those hangers-on)
Definately a good program. I’d recommend it even if you don’t have multiple IM programs or screen names. It does take a little bit of patience to fully configure, but i’ts pretty straightforward to set up initially.
It can check your AOL mail and MSN/Hotmail too.
The problems with AOL seems to have stopped, and I haven’t had any issues for a while now.
Thanks for posting the features list, abel. Very helpful–I was concerned about file transfers, and it seems to support everything but outbounds on Yahoo, which I don’t use ATT. This may be asking too much, but one of the nice features of MSN MS is the ability to launch a Netmeeting directly from the MS (the Gatesian monarchy being what it is). Anybody know if Trillian preserves this? Or would I have to invoke Netmeeting separately, then look up the other party on the Directory Server?
Oh, and Natural-J-Bankie, AOL’s been playing that game for some time, I know. I can’t figure out if that’s a clever ploy to retain market share, or the bad decision of a bunch of corporate egomaniacs.
Wisest Novel, I don’t any Netmeeting feature provided with my MSN buddies, so I’ll have to say “not currently” for now. They may integrate that at some future point, I’ll check and see if someone has mentioned it on their message board… Yup, it’s been mentioned many times, so I bet they’re at least looking into it. Ciao for now…
Well, I’ve downloaded Trillian and used it for several days now. Overall, I like it a lot, but there’s really one showstopper that has driven me to stop using it exclusively. I nearly always use IRC chat as a diversion while doing something else. With mIRC, I can use the highlight feature with variations of my screen name to signal me when someone uses my name, allowing me to flip back to the chat screen when someone is speaking to (or about) me. I don’t see any support for this functionality in Trillian. If I’m missing something, please point me in the right direction. If not, I think I’ll wait until it’s added before giving it my seal of approval.
