Build 116 is going out to all testers this morning. Additionally, we wanted to take a minute to bring a few exciting projects brewing in the community forums to your attention.

Avion Pro: A very cool new skin from Insomnautik and Scream81! Check it out on our forums here, or go directly to the deviantART download page here. Many months of effort have been put into this excellent skin and we urge you all to check it out and see what you think!

Iconpack Selector: A standalone utility built by community members DiamondNRG and Scream81 to easily change your icon packs within Trillian – more information can be found on our forums here. This is something we need to build directly into Trillian ourselves, but in the meantime the community has built a solution for you! If you find yourself swapping out icon packs or preferring a different style of icons than those we provide by default, take a look at this utility – it’s much easier than editing files by hand in our skinning language.

Enjoy the new build and be sure to drop a friendly note to the authors of these great additions to Trillian if you enjoy their work.

After years in secret development, today we proudly announce our new direction for the company: Trillian for Dogs!

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The ultimate holiday for Cerulean Studios – Trilloween – is here! While you are busy decorating your house for the season, don’t forget the essential decorations for your computer desktop!  Here are a few tips for you to have a festive and scary week with Trillian…

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Invites will be going out to all Pro customers who signed up to be alpha testers as of this morning, staged throughout this week and next. Please watch your inboxes for invites (from the ceruleanstudios.com domain); we’re looking forward to hearing all of your feedback, both positive and negative! Don’t be shy when submitting bugs and feature requests to Bugzilla, and please carefully read your invitation e-mail to ensure you’re up-to-speed on the current limitations and flaws of the alpha. Major items we haven’t (re-)added yet include but are not limited to full mail alert integration, voice/video, web profiles, MSN/Jabber/Google on Web/iPhone, a proper upgrade and installation wizard, etc. This build is still considered alpha quality and therefore feature incomplete.

Invitations will continue on their normal schedule for non-Pro customers as well. You do not need to be a paying customer to join the testing team, but we’re fast tracking Pro invitations to thank those of you that continue to keep us in business. If you’re a current or past Trillian Pro customer and did not submit your information to our alpha signup form, please do so now and we’ll be sure to get you into the team over the next week or two.

Once we have a chance to hear from our paying customers we’ll move more aggressively towards an open public beta (feature-frozen except for emergencies/horrendous oversights) and an invitation system so you can get some of your friends and family on Trillian Astra.

One caveat: this is the largest batch of invitations we’ve sent out thus far, and we are staging them accordingly. If we notice a major server explosion during any stage of the invites, we’ll halt further invites until the problems have been tracked down and resolved. We will update the blog if this happens so you’re aware and so you don’t expect an e-mail that isn’t coming.

Thank you for your patience and support, and we hope you enjoy testing the new build! Remember that we release builds roughly every week, so keep checking back with the blog for news and updates. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves before reaching beta!

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.