Trillian Pro 2 'Public' Beta Review
Reviewed by James on 09.15.2003
Retail Value: $25.00

Program History
If you are asking, "what is this Trillian you speak of?" this page is for you. If you are not familiar with the features of Trillian, this page may still be for you as much of the perspective of the rest of the article comes from the program history outline here. At its core, Trillian is a multi-medium instant messaging client, with compatability with the five major chat networks: AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, and Yahoo. The purpose of the program has been to offer an ad-free, singular program to integrate and streamline all your IM communication needs. It has had some consistent problems connecting to the various networks, notoriously AIM, until recently, when CS finally managed to completely reverse engineer the connection protocols so that the network providers could no longer block users as they could no longer distinguish Trillian users from AIM users. MSN, on the other hand, has been very helpful and forthcoming with allowing Trillian to connect to its network. Presumably, this unexpected cooperation from Microsoft is because MSN is quite intent on capturing all of AIM/AOL's market share and figures anything that gets users off of AIM-the-program, the better.

Until version 1.0 Pro, Trillian came as is. Sure, anyone could make a skin to change the look, and there were minimal options to change the way the user interacted with the client. For the most part, however, Trillian was a static program, attempting to catch up to the 'new' functions added yearly by all the different messaging protocols. About the only functional operation it held above the 'other' clients was SecureIM, the ability to have an encrypted peer-to-peer chat, though it was not available on all mediums. All this changed when version 1.0 came out, adding the ability for third-parties to create plug-ins via a publicly available SDK. CS had hoped that bringing in 3rd parties developers would allow Trillian to advance beyond the small CS developer team. However, for the most part, the plugin system was a failure, resulting in, up to now, only 27 plug-ins. (in comparison, GAIM has well over 100 plugins). This is not to say that the plug-in system was a bad idea; however, the SDK provided did not give enough access to the internals of Trillian, thereby preventing developers sufficient options for creating truly useful plug-ins. Nevertheless, as GAIM has shown, among other programs, the plug-in system has great potential.

The default plugins originally available allow the Trillian to check the weather, stocks, news (via an RSS feed), pop3 checking (no reading, just checks for existence of a new message), a minibrowser (which is just a Trillian-fied gui front end to the IE rendering engine), clipboard history, and a URL grabber. Not much to really talk about. Features apart from the plugin system included MetaContacts, which allowed grouping of various buddies from different mediums under a single name, but still allowing access to the individual buddies. Another feature which made life easier was the "default send from" feature for people with mulitple screennames on a single protocol. Mass messaging was made possible by groups on the buddy list or selectively clicking individual buddies, and a completely revamped Connection Manager replaced the previously inadequate realization of this essential portion of Trillian, which, in the end, is a program dedicated to connecting. So, why did CS make a major version jump from 1.0 to 2.0, with no stops along the way beside some essential patches to deal with system stability and connection issues?