For those who use Trillian, the new version is out. http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/.

Note that it uses a new skin format, your old skins won't work (or so I've been told).

This version enables file trasfers! Get it! Donate to the developers!

Sean

Already donated.

You could have posted about the "old" version a long time ago and I would have been able to dump ICQ and all these bloody ugly Jabber clients I have lying around. :)

Trillian seems pretty good so far. I love the interface, even if it lacks custom groups within each IM (at least I can't find a way to do this). I guess now I can finally subscribe to MSN and Yahoo without running any more clients.

Bruno

Sorry, you hadn't yet joined the BBS when we had our past discussions about ICQ replacement clients.

I was using Odigo for a while but it had some problems that Trillian handles nicely. The latest Trillian is pretty darn good, I have to say.

Not sure what you mean by custom group, but you can create as many groups as you want to organize your contacts however you like.

Sean

Ok, I found the option. You can only create new groups when you go to ADD a new user. I had imported everyone from an address book, so I didn't see it. It disabled my offline group, but I've now been able to get around that too by selecting an option to "hide offline" buddies - which now seems to show an offline group again without complaining.

So far so good. Though no one has been online since I installed it to check how it works in messaging. :) I'm just glad to get rid of the very poorly designed ICQ. Ugh.

Bruno

ICQ used to be cool, once upon a time. It kinda bloated and got complicated... Trillian goes back to basics while also integrating IM's.

The problem I have with Trillian (and I still use it, under Windows, anyway -- so it's still far superior to everything else I've used) is that it doesn't store your AIM buddies on the AIM server. And it only reads from there once (I'm sure you can force it to resync, though). This is a big annoyance when you use multiple clients.

On the flip side to that, I had Odigo lose my entire buddies list once because it re-loaded them from the server when it should not have.

Regarding the storage on the server, have you asked in the Trillian forums about that issue? Maybe there's some useful work-arounds available.

Thanks Tony, been using it since you first discussed it on the Empeg BBS, and the new version is nice, however I have still not worked out how to do conferences :-(

however I have still not worked out how to do conferences

I don't think Trillian supports ICQ chats yet, but it does support the conferences in MSN. To invite another MSN user into the chat, hit the Invite user button in the existing chat window. (On the default skin, its the envlope on the left hand side.)

I'm not sure if or how AIM and Yahoo implement this natively, so I can't offer help on how to use those conferences if Trillian supports them.

What would be awesome is if Trillian supported some sort of bridging, to allow you to start a conference with ICQ, AIM, MSN and Yahoo users all in one.

The best thing about Trillian is how easy it is to get features added. I suggest any user here heads over to the fourms there, the authors are very good about looking at the fourms and implementing features suggested there.

What would be awesome is if Trillian supported some sort of bridging, to allow you to start a conference with ICQ, AIM, MSN and Yahoo users all in one.

Now that would be a killer app.

The only drawback is that a Trillian user would have to act as the medium between the parties. This would be a problem if the Trillian user wanted to turn off his computer but the others in the chat wanted to continue.

Honestly, though, it completely surprises me that the various IM clients haven't learned how to play nice with each other and settled on an interoperability standard. We should have had all these capabilities a long long time ago.

COOL -- I tried Trillian a while back and thought it was neat, but hated it within an hour of using it.

The new Trillian is WICKED.

Probably one of the first pieces of donation-ware I'll pay up for.

Honestly, though, it completely surprises me that the various IM clients haven't learned how to play nice with each other and settled on an interoperability standard. We should have had all these capabilities a long long time ago.

There is an IETF working group, Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol, that is working on this, but they're taking way too long about it. The folks at Jabber have a nice solution, except for the fact that, at least as of the last time I looked, all their clients sucked. The server is really nice, though. There's also a group called IMUnified, which, apparently, is a group of IM companies ganging up on AOL (I infer this based on the fact that AOL is not in the group, and that they seem to refuse to include the Jabber folks).

But you're right. This should have been solved long ago. Too bad that IM didn't become popular before the mass commercialization of the Internet. It probably would have taken less than a year for massive interoperability to occur.

Is anyone else sick of ``skins''? IMHO, one of the few nice things about MSWindows is that it provided a consistent UI across apllications. But since that's been thrown out the window (NPI), even that feature is gone. And many applications don't even have a no-skin skin for me to get back there. And even if they do, they're just images, so if I change how my titlebars look, even the non-skin fails. Aarrgh.

Does the new Trillian beep randomly for anyone else? Mine keeps going off and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what causing it to do so -- there are no people logging in or out, I've not become idle or un-idle, nothing. I'm about ready to remove all of the sound events from the config, but I have the feeling that it won't help.

I had to go in and set almost every single sound to be off. The only sounds I have it beep at me for are when someone is sending me a message.

If you don't do that, it'll do little beeps every time someone's status changes on your list.

But after I changed it like I said, I get no more random beeps.