The official blog on Trillian development.
Welcome, new testers!
Hello to all of the new alpha testers! A few quick notes:
- Build 48 is the latest build. The notification on top of your login screen is a news feed and not an auto-update feature; it’s simply there as a stopgap until we build proper auto-update functionality back into Trillian Astra.
- The point of the alpha phase is to ensure we’re adding all of the right features to make Trillian Astra your IM client of choice! Please use this time to contribute your suggestions and feedback! The product is NOT done yet and there are still plenty of features we plan on adding in the coming weeks.
- Once we reach beta, we will begin aggressively knocking out performance issues and improving speed overall. Don’t worry if the build is running slowly for you, even on a newer PC – there are quite a few known performance bottlenecks right now that will be thoroughly researched once the features are finished. While we’ve done plenty of optimizations since 3.x, each time we add a new feature a new branch of code is in need of eyeballing and cleanup, and for efficiency reasons we’re waiting until the code is ‘feature complete’ before diving in too deeply.
- To those of you looking to get into the alpha test, please submit your application over at http://blog.ceruleanstudios.com/?p=9 – we WILL get to every invitation eventually, so please be patient!
Enjoy the build – we’re looking forward to your feedback and suggestions so please don’t be shy! We’ll be unveiling some exciting new functionality in the coming weeks as we continue to grow the testing team.
July 5th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
July 5th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Hold that thought, I Just got it. YAY!
July 5th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
alas no invite for me…
i have been waiting o so long
*crys
July 5th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I am not able to use Tilliance since 5 hours. When will the maintenance be finished?
July 5th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
please please please let me in, dying to test it out….its almost an obsession
July 5th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Thanks for inviting me,
July 5th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Good post CS! Hopefully the new testers will actually read it!
Build 48 has been great so far, much improved in the last few builds, I am starting to feel good about Astra again
(got a little worried it was going to take 4 years throughout April/May) 
July 5th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Me too, maunic.
July 5th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
IMO, even with all the bottlenecks, I think it’s still faster and more memory efficient than 3.1. I can’t wait to see the streamlining on the final build.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Rubbish. Signed up at each signup. Nothing.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
The Book: Vogons. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, lost, found again, queried, subjected to public inquiry, lost and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighter. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry to you.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
but aside from that… installing
July 5th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Just a point of clarification… please correct me if I’m wrong, but plug-ins… are still the same as they always were (i.e. nothing different about using them with Astra, right?
July 5th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Thanks for the invitation! I will do my best to give thorough feedback. (in reply to the last porter: I’ve been getting crashes right from the start so I’m going to start de-activating plugins to track down Incompats
July 6th, 2007 at 4:39 am
If there is a maintenance on the site, are we able to sign-in in our account within trillian? Also a question regarding the login port: Are there additional ones we can use? I’m not sure if 3158 is open in our company. But if the connection error responds on the maintenance outtage I’ll try it later.
Yes and THANK YOU for inviting my finally. Waited for so long.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:11 am
Bah. Guess I gotta keep waiting.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:53 am
I submitted my request yesterday and am patiently waiting
thank you.
July 6th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Holy crap, this is the best day of my trillian-using life!
Thanks Trillian
July 6th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Hi folks, and thanks for inviting me! ^^ I’m just testing and have no big problems at all.
Patience and luck to all waiting people!
July 6th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Question – can Astra and TrillianPro 3.whatever be installed and used on the same system? I’m asking because if there is something that is NOT working right (for the time being) with Astra and I need to “fall back” to TrillianPro 3, I really don’t want to do any uninstall/reinstall. I will obviously have tested this before anyone responds, but I’m curious.
Sensei
July 6th, 2007 at 9:11 am
@SenseiC
Just install Astra to a different directory than 3.x is installed to. Trillian defaults to
c:\Program Files\Trillian since I didn’t want to overwrite my 3.x data I installed Astra to
c:\Program Files\Astra
July 6th, 2007 at 9:36 am
two things… one… solar_eclipse2… yeah that occurred to me and (thankfully) it installed so that the Pro version still works fine…. because, as kkempe pointed out… there’s this little matter of the sign-in. If I’m tunneled into work (where I use IRC and Jabber on a daily basis) I have been unable to sign-in to Trillian Astra. Is there any sort of diagnostic logs, etc. so that I can at least see what is (or is not) going on and might be able to work around it? I’ll be checking the appropriate Windows logs, etc. in the meantime.
Sensei
July 6th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Anyone been able to get 48 build? I can’t log in because the login page is down for maintenance.. Been like that for a week and the download link in my email is still for the 44 build.. Would like to run 48, how do I get it?
July 6th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Less a bug and more a matter of personal taste, I suppose. On Pro, I used My Mail which allowed me to use the ‘My Mail Folder’ to list out all my email addresses (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Gmail, and my office Pop account). Now it only displays Gmail and the office account. It appears that there’s a notification that I have email on those other account, but the orbs do not change into envelopes anymore either. So as the notifications disappear, and you say..return to your desktop a couple hours later, you no longer know if you have email on those services waiting. Or, I may not have found the way to turn that on
July 6th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Thanks for the invite. I have been a trillian fan for a very long time and manged to get many people to use trillian. I think that Astra will be one of the best when it is all said and done. Thanks for all your hard work.
July 6th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Storm … the download in the email is always the newest version, try saving it to a different place or renaming it. Notice when you open it it will be dated July 2nd.
rich_phoenix … those icons don’t even exist in Astra right now, so that probably means they are not planning on bringing that back. If you want it, use bugzilla to request it (searching first of course as someone probably already did).
July 6th, 2007 at 11:39 am
For weeks I’ve sat here and watched the blog.. even across the country I have the time to log onto my Google reader and see whats been going down with the alpha. I like 3.1 and can’t wait to get my hands on astra. But I can’t really do that if I don’t have an invite tho. So here’s the part when I cry like a little baby and beg for the invite. PLEASE PLEASE can I get my invite. I am sure I was one of the first ones to register. Well at least on the same day as registration began.
Even if I never get an invite I still love CS. you guys ROCK.
P.s. I’m going to register again right now!
July 6th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Just got the invite yesterday, thank you very much!!
July 6th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Thanks for the invite… I’m looking forward to being a productive member of the Alpha team! Great to see Jabber working, it crapped out on me in 3.1 recently and I had to switch to another messenger but now I’m back online at work with Astra!
July 6th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Good news Lone_Alpha_Wolf , now we can be Astra buddies, hehe.
July 6th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
This waiting kills me. I guess being patient for another two months will pay off. Congrats on your invites.
July 6th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
What is the preferred way one goes about leaving feedback? Also, anyone figure how to log into Bugzilla?
July 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Damned, still no invite!?
Please !
I have been waiting for so long -_-
July 6th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Flyer00 the bugzilla info is in your invite email. Read it
Plus the forums have a lot of info on this, there is a whole thread in the “astra chat” forum about how to use bugzilla.
July 6th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Thanks for inviting me!!!
Trillian Astra is the best!
July 6th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
YES! I finally got in as an alpha tester! Build 48 is certainly looking very nice and a lot of my annoyances (like Yahoo file transfer problems) seems to be fixed now. However I can’t get my buddy icon to show on my friend’s messengers. Tested it with a friend who is using Yahoo Messenger’s latest version 8.x and he told me that all he sees is a black box. Tried different buddy icons, even ones that come with Trillian and no luck. Is this one of the items on the to-be-fixed list ?
July 6th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Finally got my invite! Really pleased. It’s a beautiful thing to behold!
July 6th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Patience.
July 6th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Darn, I got my email just an hour or so ago to join the alpha, but can’t get in. The email gives me a link, along with a username (this one) my email address and a password, but it doesn’t let me in.
Any ideas of what the problem could be? When I click on the link it presents me with a username and password prompt instantly, and I’ve tried both DallasFlier and my email address with the password from the email, and neither will work.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Thanks for adding me to the beta, I signed up a LONG time ago.. thought I was forgotten, nice to see otherwise! Thanks
-Keith
July 6th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Finally got an invite! I thought it would never happen. Thanks for the invite!
Some of my initial thoughts…I definitely notice improved performance. I haven’t really noticed any groundbreaking features in the Windows app yet though. I really want to try the web app. Perhaps, it will change my opinion.
July 6th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
July 6th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
DallasFlier .. the username password you are being prompted for is not the one you picked … read the email!
July 6th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
maunic,
Yes, I have read every word of the email. I know how to get past the Javascript login window. I was asking if anyone was able to actually log into Bugzilla (via the Bugzilla login screen). This was not covered in the email.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Looks like you just create your own Bugzilla account. Wasn’t expecting that since we always assign our testers their accounts where I work. All is well now
July 6th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Ah , well you didn’t say you were talking about Bugzilla.
Would be a lot of work for them to make the bugzilla accounts now that there are probably closer to 1000 people in the test.
July 6th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Hey, how can I get my password resent or changed if I lost it? It doesnt matter for the client, since I saved the accounts.ini file that stores the password, but be nice to have for the webclient once it comes back up to test…
July 6th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
DallasFlier, read your email very carefully. if unsure, read it again; it holds the key
July 6th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
I’m glad I’m finally part of the alpha test. Astra is looking great. It’s going to be awesome when its done. Keep up the good work!
July 7th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Hello and thank you for the invite..
So far everything on Astra looks great.. Love the UI.
However there is one thing that bothers me so far is the advertisements in the IM windows..
I could see this on the “free version” but I dont think that this Advertising in IM’s in a “paid for program” should be there. Can this be turned off??
Also something else i dont see is that I work in a office and with my 3.1 pro vers. i can set to require a password to launch trillian.
So far everything i have tried on Astra works well.. I like the choice of being able to change the color of the skin..
I have used this on Vista Ultimate and have no problems..
Will give more update when i have more..
Thank you,
Brandon (Trillian 3.1 pro/Astra)
July 7th, 2007 at 3:39 am
YankeesRule, you can’t do that yet, so keep the email.
If for some reason you don’t have the email you can use the password decrypter tool that Jiquera has on the forums, I would think that should be able to look at the MD5 hash in your ini file and tell you what the password is.
July 7th, 2007 at 10:06 am
bojowaggie…
The “knowledge bar” will have customization options including the ability to turn it off. Those preferences just are not ready yet.
The password on your profile option would be the same as having it NOT save your Astra password now. I know you can’t change this password yet, but soon you will be able to.
July 7th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Thanks for inviting me in. Im excited to finally be able to try out Astra and look forward to it. Ive already installed it and love what I see so far!
July 7th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Thanks for the invite, i received and downloaded the binary and installed (i decided to overwrite 3.1).
Next thing i was asked for login and password, used the ones provided on the email , and selected to import the settings.
Well , it did’t logon, not sure if it’s due to mainteinance (no message about it), but got the error saying:”Error while connecting, Please check your account name and connection, then try again”
Thanks, i’ll try to logon later.
July 8th, 2007 at 9:04 am
now, I’m starting to get depressed. I even renewed my trillian pro account for another year in hopes of getting on the alpha test and I don’t even use windows. I am running a MacBook Pro with no trillian. why don’t I have trillian yet? maybe it’s because you don’t like me? no, your probably giving it to users who aren’t even pro users and who are also running a machine who is already capable of running another version of trillian. Thanks Trillian Astra team.
July 8th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to beta test Trillian Astra.
July 8th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
AdamWillis … there is no MAC version, so you would have nothing to test anyways.
July 8th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
So basically you wasted your money … why would you buy a windows only program when you exclusively use MAC?
July 8th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Does anyone know if the invites are being selected by date of submission?
July 9th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
ttaker – not necessarily.
July 10th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Thanks for the invite..It is working PERFECTLY in Vista with no problems at all. NO connection problems, install problems or configuration problems!!
The new draw feature is fun….looking forward to the full version!!!
Thanks!!
July 10th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I got one
YaY for me
Thanks guys!!
All looks silky so far
July 10th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Waiting and waiting and waiting and nothing. I hope I get an invite soon! Keep up the great though! Can’t wait ’til it’s finished.
July 10th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Crashfire, don’t feel bad I still haven’t gotten an invite yet either.
July 10th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I got an invite, but whenever I try to login I get bad password, I use exactly what was given to me in the email, is there something else that I need to do, and since their is maintinance I can not get to login page.
Anyone have any advice?
July 11th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Methos: post your details in this forum thread… http://forums.ceruleanstudios.com/showthread.php?t=87325
July 11th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
So after using Astra for about a week now. I really like it.. However I have noticed that i can file transfer with AIM but not Yahoo. Will this be a feature in the future? The file transfer works really weel and it is really slick. No problems with it so far. I have not had any glitches I am really happy. I love the new look. Changing the Away messages are really slick and easly changable. I have no complaints..
Thanks for everything.
Brandon
(Trillian 3.1 Pro/Astra)
July 12th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Yahoo file transfer does work … likely the reason you can’t use it is because you are trying to use it with someone that has an outdated client … such as Trillian 3.1.
July 12th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Hi,
I am sorry to be inpatient but does anyone know if they are close to ending this round of invites? My inbox is still empty don’t want to miss a chance at being a tester. Thank you.
July 12th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
this round? ttaker, they do invites every week…
July 12th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Thank you for the invite. My impression so far is that memory and cpu wise Astra is even better then Trillian 3.1. It has been extremely stable and easy to use. File transfer with yahoo now works, which is a huge plus. The graphics and skins are top notch. Excellent design and very functional. Kudos to all the developers.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:59 am
No invitaion for me
July 13th, 2007 at 9:21 am
knock knock…
lemme in……..
when will spots ever open up?
July 13th, 2007 at 9:55 am
@MINDTRICK
When will spots open up? They’ve been handing out invites regularly since Build 48 was released. You just need to be patient.