This week was pretty slow at Cerulean Island. July 4th came mid-week, and we decided to put out a quick build on Monday to address some important bugs that would have negatively impacted some of the new alpha testing team’s first impressions. This, unfortunately, didn’t leave us with an incredible amount of time to work on new features and bugs.
Instead, we decided to add roughly 3000 new testers to the team, our largest expansion yet! This aggressive headcount increase was due in part to the launch of our upgraded fleet of shiny Astra servers on the backend – as we’ve been repeating all along, we’re putting alot of effort and focus into ensuring that the servers can support the load of our entire userbase once we launch. One of the unique challenges we face with Trillian Astra is that once we hit the switch, we need to support a large number of concurrent connections to our backend very quickly. As anyone who has done serious server development can tell you, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
Given our limited development time, we decided to take a small break from our standard development roadmap. (Yes, we actually have one of those! ) It was important for us to continuously watch the servers, add new testers, and make the small changes we noticed necessary as they cropped up throughout the week.
Ultimately, we ended up finding some time to work on some “alternative” interfaces to connect to the servers of Trillian Astra. We think some of you might have a unique need for this one…
Just when you think things cannot get any better… they can!
Today we will be releasing Build 38, featuring a few great new features that will make your contact list a pleasure to use and transform your desktop into a state-of-the-art instant messaging machine.
We have completely revamped our basic set of service icons in order to suit the new image of Trillian Astra. Unlike their predecessors (which were also all drawn in vectors), our new icons stretch beyond 48×48 and are completely scalable and ready for Flash. Additionally, they are drawn to spec for Windows Vista and have coherent perspective and lighting. The glass quality of the new spheres complements perfectly with the translucent metallic surfaces of the Trillian Cordonata skin.
To solve the problem of having way too many subway lines, we introduced duotone spheres in Trillian 3.0. This concept was applied mostly to secondary IM services and worked well for a long time. We ultimately decided to color the Astra service with green and blue (the colors of our dear planet Earth and the colors of the two spheres in our logo), and, as a result, the new icons have a more explicit division between the two colors, forming a sphere somewhat resembling a yin-yang. It should be easier to differentiate between Astra and ICQ now, as ICQ is pushed towards a more yellowish tone.
To showcase these new icons in their most glorious form, we’ve added a new contact list layout without avatars. In addition to lowering visual noise, this layout has the added benefit of bringing the contact list focus back to representing a contact by status.
In response to the enthusiasm of our alpha testers, we added a few features with the highest vote count from our Bugzilla database. First and foremost, you can now sort your contact list by the size of the log file. This has the effect of placing all your BFFs at the top of your contact list, as those are ideally the people you communicate with the most. Secondly, you can now preview your latest messages by glancing at your Windows taskbar, which has also been enhanced to show you how many new messages you’ve received from your message windows. Lastly, skin development could not get any easier, as we’ve added the main Trillian menus into our right click menu for the contact list!
We will also roll out icons for not only secondary but also third-party IM services in the coming weeks, as a sincere thanks for those who have supported and invested in Trillian.
By now, those of you currently involved in our alpha program have probably had the opportunity to play around with our web-based IM offering over at http://www.trillianastra.com. The point of this product is to provide useful IM access to Trillian users that aren’t at their main PC without the bulk of carrying around a USB key or, even worse, re-downloading Trillian wherever they go. There are, however, some obvious flaws in web-based applications:
The web application is stuck inside the browser. We love our web browser, but when you stuff an application inside of it you tend to lose more functionality than you think. Most people make this sacrifice because the convenience of the web app outweighs the functionality loss – your system tray and task bar notifications, the ability to minimize an application without minimizing 15 others, the ability to use aesthetically pleasing skins and skinned windows without the bulk of a browser frame, etc.
Web products do not necessarily integrate well with their host operating system. Trillian supports a plugin archtecture that lets you do all sorts of whacky things: track your music, invoke text-to-speech frontends, display your CPU utilization and speed, and more. We can also log your conversations directly to the hard drive, expose an XML-based skinning language that supports per-pixel transparency, layered windows, borderless windows, and in general take full advantage of OS-specific rendering features, natively. Although many of these graphical goodies are available on the web, they are typically constrained by the browser window. This is no fun.
We are therefore proud to present our first crack at solving some of these problems, with what we’re currently referring to as our “OS Layer” technology. Take a look below and let us know what you think – we’d love to hear your feedback, comments and suggestions! This is still internal technology (not a part of our alpha program) but we want to be sure we’re heading down the right road before giving it too many cycles.
Some technical information:
This is not powered by Adobe Apollo technology. While we have heard more and more about Apollo in recent weeks, it has not been made available to us and we have never tried it. We work long and devoted hours in a small office building in Brookfield, CT; not being piped into the Silicon Valley hype machine does have its disadvantages, we suppose, but it only makes us work harder! This is all technology developed here at Cerulean Studios.
This technology, like Trillian Astra Web before it, requires Flash 9.
This is the real deal – with it, we can access the system tray, task bar, the local filesystem, dock the contact list, etc. The goal of this project is to emulate 99% of common Trillian functionality in something incredibly lightweight and easy to grab on-the-go. While we won’t likely be doing anything incredibly advanced here (that’s what Trillian “regular” is for), we will strive to do enough to make it worth your while.
This is currently internal technology and not available yet to anyone. It will be made available to our team of testers as soon as its ready, but at this point your feedback and suggestions would be great!
After months of operation and seeing things working out, I would say that our invention, Instant Lookup, introduced in Trillian 3 Series, placed Trillian in the forefront of the Internet revolution. As suggested by the CNet Article, Instant Lookup can contribute to the development of the semantic web with its context-awareness – the ability to look inside a word and read between the lines.
The base idea of Instant Lookup came from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s electronic eye in Terminator 2: if Arnold’s vision is focused on a subject, data about that subject came out immediately to help his investigation. Same here in the midst of a real-time online chat conversation. Though our technology is not developed to a degree that lets you scan and recognize objects, our technology nowadays definitely allows you to scan a word and find tons of knowledge about it through Google, Wikipedia, or whatever it is.
A chat is an exchange of knowledge between two people. Since chat is real-time, there is an urgency to know what an unknown word means right away. Usually a question about the unknown word will be raised, but Instant Lookup cuts this part of conversation short while allowing the topic to go deeper by giving preliminary knowledge about the unknown.
A lot of times the Internet is about taking a nice technology to combine with advertisements to generate money. Instant Lookup is the reverse: We referenced the idea of context-aware links, usually known as ‘adwords’, but instead of giving you tons of ads about mundane words, we provide you knowledge or useful links about special words. A surprising by-product is formed: Instant Lookup is also a tool of discovery. It allows users to read the objective meanings behind what the other has said, what he or she has said, and lets them learn new things every day from the Web, just through chatting.
It makes me wonder how much one can discover through this tool. After centuries of accumulation of knowledge, there is so much within a single word. With more improvements coming up in future, I hope that Instant Lookup will become one good essential tool that many can’t miss.
There are a lot of new things going on in the Studios! And since I don’t want the blog to degrade into just a place to check if there are any beta-testings soon, I’ll post about the thoughts that went into the designs of the UI and the graphics.
One of the advantages of text messaging is the ability to record and organize every single detail of the conversation without consuming a big amount of space. Audio and Video messages are intimate, but are very hard to search for what was being said. In text messages, a recorded conversation can also act as the minutes of a meeting, which makes ideas very easy to be recalled and manipulated.There are a lot of text messagers out there, most of them have message history (or logging) functions, but not a lot (or almost none) of them are equipped with functions that let you use these histories effectively. Therefore, in Trillian 3.0, we aim to make text messaging more useful and effective by introducing a very powerful XML-based Activity History system.This screenshot differs from what we have now, probably because it is the first draft ever designed for Trillian 3, back in the hot summer days of year 2003. Trillian 2 wasnt even released yet! Many revisions were made afterwards to bring you what you got today.
Since then, we had decided to adhere to the Windows visual style instead of making it skinnable, since it would slow down development and create another hell for skinners (they got 10+ windows to skin already). The interface was streamlined to use tabs instead of toolbars on both left and right panels.
One of the disadvantages of the old History is that it is very hard to locate important messages. Bookmarks are probably one of the godsends of Activity History. I had always had a habit of jotting down the dates in the Extra Info when I had important conversations. A right-click menu on the message window solves the problem wonderfully. We are planning to add an ability to rename bookmarks, too.
Another problem being addressed is the difficulty to locate the time and date of the message. The calendar and the timeline formats intend to visualize meaningfully a conversation by displaying time intervals graphically.
Being able to ’see’ when the file is being transfered is great. Being able to see what files were sent and received in a ‘person-centric’ way brings the computer as a tool back to the people instead of the file system.
XML-based history makes the log easily manipulable, searchable and extendable for future functions.
The ability to trace back what you had done and what you had said – though eerie at times – aids or questions the authenticity of one’s memory. For example, one might have been very angry during a conversation, but if he looks back at the log a few weeks later, his perception might change.
What you see right now in 3.1 might just be a tip of the iceberg. In the future, we will add more features into Activity History to make Trillian one of your most indispensible tools, and confirm another reason why text messaging is sometimes more superior than a phone call or even video chat.
) It was important for us to continuously watch the servers, add new testers, and make the small changes we noticed necessary as they cropped up throughout the week.
This screenshot differs from what we have now, probably because it is the first draft ever designed for Trillian 3, back in the hot summer days of year 2003. Trillian 2 wasnt even released yet! Many revisions were made afterwards to bring you what you got today.