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

SDK 2.0 and Its Potential
Lots of the features touted by CS can be lumped under the revamp of the SDK, giving more access to the internal functions of Trillian. This access was originally cut off, allegedly, for security issues. CS was afraid that allowing a plugin too much access to the program could allow malicious code to run. Either CS revamped more of the internal code than we think they have to improve the security, or CS decided that the concern was not called for. Either way, devs now have a lot more options and flexibility for programming plugins that can access most of the functions of Trillian.

Jabber and Other Connections
Jabber support was one of the most asked for options on the Trillian forums. Many were upset that the 'ultimate' multi-IM client didn't support the open standard IM protocol. Well, those complaints, and any concerning any other medium, have now been settled. CS went ahead and made the SDK so that it allows plugins to be made which add an entire medium to Trillian. It seems that the new skins should allow for the appropriate icons to be created for these mediums. How much extra work this is for the skin devs is not yet clear. However, current 1.0 skins do not support the gui options available with the default skin (i.e. no medium icon on the buddy list). Hopefully adding this support will be easy, or the range of viable skins now available may diminish greatly.

SuperToolTips
ToolTips are something that have been available in Trillian and many other applications for some time. Now, however, the user can customize the tooltip on a per buddy basis. You can connect your weather plugin or timezone plugin to the tooltip and set an identification zone for your buddy, so that his tooltip will display the weather and time in his/her area. Of course, these are just two examples. The SDK should allow a wide variety of information to be displayed in the tooltip.

InterPlugin Communication
When I first heard about this option, I was more than a bit skeptical about the usefullness. I mean, I could've cared less if my birthday, calendar, timezone, and weather plugins could interoperate to schedule the birthday party inbetween rainy days and at the right time so the friend in Belize could be hooked up via webcam at a time convenient for all. Upon inquiring for ideas about the true power (read IM related functionality) of this plugin, I realized that this feature could allow for command line remote control access to Trillian, similar to that which is already available in GAIM. Other things would be to allow the text-to-speech plugin to hook into any of the other plugins so things like system tray notifcations can become audible events. Useful not only for the person not looking at his screen 24/7, but also visually impaired users of Trillian. Since SDK2.0 is still not available, however, the full potential of this feature is not yet known.