Archive for the ‘Cerulean News’ Category
January 23rd, 2013
Trillian 5.3 for Windows, Trillian for Business!
A couple of cool announcements today. To start with, we’re taking Trillian 5.3 for Windows out of beta and making it available to everyone. We’re also announcing a special business version of Trillian that tackles most of the commonly-requested, business-oriented features that customers have been requesting over the years. Take a look at what’s new!
Group chat improvements.
Save chats to your contact list, automatically join selected chats, stay in chat rooms even when closing the window, edit topics directly from the chat window, and much more!
Trillian group chats.
In addition to beefing up group chats across the board, we’re also unveiling Trillian group chats in 5.3! Right now you’ll need to be on the Windows client to take advantage of group chats but we’ll be rolling support out for other devices soon. Trillian group chats are a great way to keep a team connected – they’re persistent and cloud-history backed, ensuring you can catch up on conversation that happened while you weren’t around.
In-game chat.
Our new in-game plugin exposes an overlay that works inside of full screen games to keep you chatting while you play! In-game chat supports tabbed chatting, alerts, and a cool “unread badge” that sticks around even when the overlay isn’t visible so you always know how many unread messages await you. You can enable the plugin in your “Chat Windows” preferences.
Trillian for Business.
Claim your domain with Trillian for Business! Small teams looking for an easy way to communicate without managing internal IM servers and larger teams looking to control client deployment and policies can both benefit from Trillian for Business. Learn more on our FAQ page.
SSL improvements.
5.3 vastly improves the way Trillian handles SSL certificate validation. The list of root certificate authorities that Trillian trusts is now bundled in a user-configurable text file, and when talking to servers with self-signed or otherwise invalid certificates Trillian will now let you know so that you can decide how to proceed.
The small stuff.
Lots of minor visual cleanups went into 5.3 as well, including some new status icons to make it more obvious who is online and who is away. Both message windows and the contact list have received some shiny new visual upgrades and general cleanups, our Skype integration should now work correctly on Windows 8, and Trillian users can now be invited to Google Talk chat rooms. We also spent some time improving the IRC engine in minor ways for 5.3. Check out the full changelog here, and thanks for supporting Trillian!
Posted in Cerulean News, Trillian for Windows
Changelog |
107 Comments 
January 18th, 2013
Trillian and Windows Live Messenger
As many of you have heard by now, Microsoft is shutting down Windows Live Messenger and directing users to Skype. There are two important concepts at play here – the Messenger clients and the Messenger servers. When we talk about the Messenger client, we’re referring to the official Microsoft Windows Live Messenger software, not Trillian. We wanted to take a minute and list all of the things we know so far in order to give Trillian customers as much time as possible to decide how best to proceed.
1. Effective early this year, Microsoft will be disabling their own Messenger client software. This means if you or your friends use the Messenger client, you won’t be able to sign in. As far as we know, this will have no impact on Trillian or other third-party IM solutions as the change is software-specific.
2. Some time next year, Microsoft will begin to disable their Messenger servers. This move will impact every client, including Trillian and any other third-party IM software that you and your friends may be using. At this point, the Messenger service as you know it will cease to exist – you will not be able to sign in.
3. As a result, Microsoft is currently asking its customers to merge their Messenger and Skype accounts and install the latest version of the Skype software. Unfortunately, the Skype-sanctioned method that we use to communicate with Skype relies on an SDK known as “SkypeKit”, which as of this writing does not work with migrated accounts. This means that if you listen to Microsoft and merge your Skype and Messenger accounts, you will be bricking your copy of Trillian in terms of Skype access. We are hopeful that Skype will be issuing a new update to their SkypeKit SDK that works with migrated accounts but have no insight into if and/or when this will occur. In the meantime, consider hanging tight on the migration if you want to continue using Skype through Trillian. One point of later clarification: until Microsoft starts rejecting Skype logins from your original Skype usernames, you can still use Skype through Trillian with your Skype usernames. It won’t be until a Windows Account is required that Trillian in its current form will have trouble signing in, and hopefully the SDK will be updated by then.
To minimize possible service outages, we recommend that any of you using Trillian to talk to other Trillian users start taking steps to migrate over to the Trillian IM network (referred to as “Astra” in some places) or another Trillian-supported IM network as soon as possible. Your Trillian username can be shared with other Trillian users so that they can add you and start chatting right away. Like Messenger, the Trillian network supports buzzes, drawing, voice and video chats, file transfers, and strong privacy controls. Unlike Messenger, the Trillian network also uses SSL by default to encrypt your conversations over-the-wire, supports persistent group chats, and is more reliable in terms of online and offline message delivery. If you’re currently relying on Messenger at your business, be sure to also evaluate our business-centric offerings to see if they will work for your company. We’ll keep everyone posted as we learn more about Messenger and Skype; thanks for supporting Trillian!
Posted in Cerulean News
September 17th, 2012
Trillian 5.2 for Windows!
Trillian 5.2 for Windows has left beta and is now available to all customers!
Native spellcheck integration.
Our message windows and social windows will now make sure you’re not making any mistakes when you type! Auto-correct optional.
Better Windows 7 support.
Seen above, we now have the ability to split tabbed chats into their individual windows in the taskbar and have also added some great new jumplist features. Of course, these all work on the new Windows 8 too!
Twitter upgrades.
Although we’ve always supported both native retweets and the older-style retweets, the option was buried in a preference. We’ve taken the time to tidy things up a bit and now expose both methods directly in the right click menu. You can also now follow conversations right inside of Trillian, among other improvements.
As always, we’ve also taken the opportunity to fix a giant chunk of bugs in this release, bringing improved performance and stability to the product. We hope you enjoy Trillian 5.2, and we’ll be back with a new Trillian 5.3 beta soon!
Posted in Cerulean News, Trillian for Windows
August 28th, 2012
Trillian 2.0 for iOS: Now with iPad support!
We are pleased to introduce Trillian 2.0 for iOS, the first release of Trillian as a universal app that works on your iPhone, iPod, and iPad!
iPad.
Trillian 2.0 features a beautiful new interface designed exclusively for your iPad. Because Trillian’s primary element is a collection of small chat bubbles, simply “making things bigger” felt awkward to us; worse, large windows with small text snippets sometimes required a slight turn of the head while reading. Our solution keeps chat windows sanely sized and uses the rest of the screen for tabs, swiping, and in-app notifications!
Launch.
Across the iPhone and iPad, Trillian’s new launchpad UI lets you keep up with the people most important to you at a single glance. Paired with optional address book integration, Trillian can now automatically import names and photos to really make your launchpad shine. In addition, your standard contact list is still available, searchable, groupable, and sortable according to your personal preferences – we’ve even added a few new settings!
Improved Security.
Although we’ve always transmitted passwords using TLS, Trillian 2.0 now uses TLS everywhere, meaning all of your chats are now encrypted over the wire and better protected from third-party eavesdropping. Privacy and security are very important to us and we’ll continue our efforts at keeping private conversations private.
Polished and shined.
Trillian 2.0 is the fastest version of Trillian yet, with additional speedups and optimizations across the board. Almost every screen of Trillian has been improved, from minor graphic updates to ensuring orientation changes are as smooth as silk. Chat windows now support in-window notifications to let you easily read messages from more than one person at a time. A mobile indicator – for those of you that use the Trillian chat network – helps your friends quickly know when you’re away from your desk. Lastly, a whole batch of new emoticons make their proud debut in this release!
Next steps.
We’ll be bringing all of this thinking to Trillian for Android in the next major release, so stay tuned if you’re an Android geek. In the meantime we’ll be listening carefully to user feedback and making improvements. Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy Trillian 2.0 for iOS!
Posted in Cerulean News, Trillian for iPhone
July 30th, 2012
Trillian News: Server updates and summer status report.
Hi everyone – we’ve put out new builds across all of our desktop products to account for some server upgrades last week. Hopefully this will resolve the last of the connection issues some of you have been experiencing, and if not, we’ll get additional updates out as necessary. Sorry for the service disruption and thanks for your patience! The changes in the Windows builds are entirely related to internal communication with our servers and there were no additional fixes or changes. Version 1.4 of the Mac client also received these fixes in addition to some new emoticons, better support for retina displays, and a handful of other minor fixes. With the server updates out of the way, we are now in a better position to launch some of the mobile updates we’d mentioned in an earlier post. So here’s the current status roundup:
- Trillian for Windows. Version 5.2 is almost ready for release. A few more fixes and we will push it out to everyone. We’ve also started work on 5.3 and can’t wait to share new features we have in store for it!
- Trillian for Mac. Now that 1.4 is in the App Store, we’re working on 1.5 with a few enhancements to metacontact logic and better support for image transfers being synced between devices. After that we will be pulling the group chat code we’ve been working on into production.
- Trillian for iPhone. We are almost ready to send the update to the App Store for review. It’s looking great!
- Trillian for Android. Not as far along as the iPhone build, but early builds are looking great and fit beautifully into the modern Ice Cream Sandwich+ world!
- Trillian for Web. Early research on a Flash-free variant has turned into a fully-working prototype. Hopefully just another month or two on this and we’ll have something to share with everyone.
Stay tuned!