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

Conclusion
I know it may seem as if I've been very harsh on the newest release of Trillian, but it is only out of love that I offer such harsh criticism. I have tried GAIM out, and it is not as feature rich or stable as Trillian. Though the lack of cross-platform compatability in Trillian is annoying, I can live with it. My bone to pick with Trillian, made very clear in Trillian 2, is the rate of development. There is no doubt in my mind that CS sees this as a problem as well, which is what has motivated them to create the plugin system, hoping that geeky users will help them develop their product to a higher level, faster. Whether they saw the rate of development of GAIM, Trillian's open-source counterpart, and became scared or something else entirely is a matter of speculation. While I still primarily use Trillian on my system, and will continue to do so until something surpasses it, I am worried that GAIM will in the next year be a better featured program. Trillian is exhibiting some of the symptoms of other products that no longer quickly develop: Version number bloat (Version 1 should never have existed without Unicode support, not enough has changed to call this a major version change) and repetitive listings of essentially the same feature in the bug-fix list. Trillian 2 is still the best multi-IM client, but it offers relatively few features over its predecessor and is susceptible to being passed in the near future by otherclients vying for the most popular multi-IM client position.