Lots of great stuff in the new Trillian 5.2, now available for public beta testing! As with our Mac version, we’re making an effort this year to keep our releases slightly smaller in scope so that we can get them to you on a more regular basis. Our goals for the Windows product this year are to keep updates flowing smoothly, to tackle a large batch of group chat enhancements and feature requests, and to release a few other surprises we’ve been working on lately. So what’s new in 5.2?

• 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 the new beta! Download here.

• Trillian for Windows. Version 5.2 is feature complete and undergoing internal beta testing. We hope to have a beta ready in the coming weeks for everyone to test!
• Trillian for Mac. Version 1.3 is currently in Apple’s review queue and contains more bugfixes and a few minor features. Right now it’s looking like we may synchronize the Mac group chat build with a corresponding update on the Windows side, but we’ll see how the timing plays out on that one.
• Trillian for iPhone. A large update is coming this year with a refreshed user interface and some other cool features, some of which rely on the server upgrades we mentioned above. Want a sneak peek and like testing beta builds? Get in touch!
• Trillian for Android. Also working on a UI refresh and a few new features this year.
• Trillian for BlackBerry. We are continuing to support the existing codebase with bugfixes as necessary. We’ll see what BlackBerry 10 brings!
• Trillian for Web. Early research has begun on a version of this that doesn’t rely on Flash! So far it’s looking lightning fast and we think it will be a great base for the future.

We have a few other surprises in store this year as well and we can’t wait to share them with everyone. Thanks for your support!

1) Facebook causing a crash on connection.

2) Google Talk and Facebook avatars showing up mismatched in the contact list and elsewhere.

We’ve also fixed a few other bugs in build 18 – click the changelog to see the specifics. Enjoy the build!

Today we’re moving Trillian 5.1 for Windows out of the labs and into release status! Trillian 5.1 is the first version of Trillian to be officially “plugged into Skype” courtesy of the great new SkypeKit for Desktop. This means you can run Skype directly inside of Trillian without having to keep the original client running! Trillian 5.1 also features a modernized activity history viewer, the ability to send pictures on all services, and a bunch of other great features and important bugfixes.

We also have exciting news for those of you in the “buy it and own it” camp – by popular request, we’re launching a brand new way to get Trillian Pro: the lifetime license! For the very first time in our history we are offering a true lifetime license for Trillian, good for all future versions across all product lines. You’ll get all the latest and greatest features and never see any ads. We’re offering discounts to all past customers, including a special prorate for those of you who’ve already purchased a 5.0 subscription. Check out the details and pricing in the Trillian Store!

We hope you enjoy the new release. The final build number is 5.1.0.15, so beta testers may already be running the release build. A direct download link is here, and we’ll be offering 5.1 through auto-update over the coming days as well.

UPDATE: We’ve released build 14 with a bugfix for Cyrillic history searching.

UPDATE: Another build, 15, to fix this morning’s AIM/IMAP crash.