Believe it or not, the planning of Trillian 3.0 began more than a year ago. While I was working on the final touches of the Whistler skin in Trillian Pro 2.0, we had also started studying and designing new features and possibilities for the next version.

As a part-time employee of Cerulean Studios and a full-time student of Rhode Island School of Design, I had to live my life 1.5 times more to be capable of both jobs, and it wasn’t easy. Architecture studios were highly demanding, but I would not lower my standards in the work of Cerulean Studios either.

It is not unusual to work on architecture in the morning and Trillian the whole night, or simply work on Trillian at school sometimes. Back in the days I would spend the whole weekend on skinning and drawing new stuffs. Don’t even talk about going down to party, and be a downright geek workaholic. However, working too much was no good. I lost too many friends as a result and I had no mood to work anymore. The time working on 3.0 coincided the time I took an architecture studio off last semester. This allowed me to change my working style and gave me a lot more time to try new things. I took time off going out and knowing new people, and it turned out that I was able to accomplish more work by being a happier person. (If you took time to read my personal blog, you know who they are .) Such better mood was reflected in the design of the new icons, which I will talk about in the next blogs.

I am studying real Architecture, and it is slightly ironic or unusual that I am also working on ‘Architecture’ in Trillian… well, more like Software Architecture without the backend part. Sometimes I joked to Kevin that “Too bad you are hiring an architect to do design job… I don’t do pretty ornamental things. It has to be pretty with a reason, something functional.” In Trillian 3, I am more involved in the whole software rather than just the skin. Stay tuned as we finalize the software.

So, my job was not just about making logos, designing web site, making pretty skins and coding them, but also was about introducing or reorganizing new features, designing every single window and how each window relate to each other, and cleaning up all menus and buttons and lines to the most minute detail. Writing up proposals and stuff was very fun though time-consuming. But after all we would be very proud when we saw the feature actually being built and working.

Working in a small company like this is really great because Scott, Kevin and I could also easily get work done quickly by just sending IMs. One day Scott might have a brilliant idea and then Kevin would comment on how it would work in the backend and codes, and I would create a blueprint of what it would look like and how it would look to the user. Since I lived 150 (and some times 8000) miles away from Connecticut where the office is, Trillian is really the most indispensible tool for all of us to get an idea through.

Another amazing thing about working with Scott and Kevin is that we are highly synchronized in what we are thinking. That Scott could come up the exact same idea as I did at the exact same moment makes it very easy to communicate and get an idea through (although sometimes we will actually spend a whole week to fight over an idea, e.g. the Search bar). Whenever that happens, we’ll type “:D ^v ” to celebrate.

With such an excellent collaboration, I am very optimistic and confident about Trillian 3. It is clean, elegant, versatile and powerful. I walk outside and the whole sky is cerulean.

So do any of you developers out there suffer from the same malady as we do? It seems like every time we write a cool feature and revisit it a few days later, it’s completely and horribly disfigured and doesn’t work whatsoever! We all get a good chuckle out of…

THE MYSTERY OF EXPIRING CODE!<AngryDeveloperVent>
Sometimes it seems like most of our time is spent coding features “for the second time” thanks to this filthy disease. What one earth *happens* to these poor little lines of code when noone uses them for a 24 hour period? Perfectly good functions suddenly stop working entirely; blocks of code magically reappear elsewhere in code, where they’ll cause “maximum damage” (I had this happen last night, I swear!); CPU utilization goes through the roof when you’re doing nothing at all!
</AngryDeveloperVent>In other news, we’d like to thank everyone for submitting Trillian 3 beta applications. We’re getting closer and closer – the major memory leaks have been plugged, the slow-moving code has been beaten into submission, and the polish is being applied to the rest of the product. Everyone hang tight!

Sometimes we wonder if everyone knows all the neat tricks you can perform with Trillian’s event system. For example, I’ve programmed Trillian to react to the hotkey Ctrl-Shift-K to always load up Kevin’s meta contact window. It’s pretty handy during the day as we’re bashing out code to not have to sort through my desktop and find Kevin.

The event is of the ‘hotkey’ type with an action of ‘Send Message’. Coooooool!

We are now accepting applications for our Trillian3 early adopter beta program. Check it out at http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/beta.

Some notes:

• This will be a very early beta, and will likely leak memory and crash like a good beta should. Tester beware!
• Not all applications will be accepted; we only need a small team right now.
• We will likely do a more public beta down the road similar to what we did last time. Unlike last time, we have to test both Pro and Basic so everyone will be getting a chance!
• If you are picked, you will be testing whatever version of Trillian you currently own – Basic or Pro.

Once we are ready to send out a beta, chosen applicants will receive an e-mail from us. We do not have a date or a deadline; the beta will be sent out as soon as it’s done.

Thank you for your interest and participation!

It will be an exciting experience for all of you and all of us to see the release of the all-new Trillian 3 Series. As the number “3″ suggested, it is a complete renewal and a significant leap of features. It also tidies up the numbers of the two products Trillian Pro and Trillian Basic, giving a more consistent impression to users.

To bring out such impressions and experiences, one of the most important aspects of design of Trillian, besides the user interface and the backend, is actually the most superficial, that is, graphic design such as the logo, skins, packaging, promotional items or the web site. In fact, one of the first things that we have finalized is the logo. Today we will officially introduce the brand-new logos for Trillian 3 Series.

You may first notice the completely new design of the logo for Trillian Basic. It is a very cheerful-looking graphic, and it surprisingly embraces the two-globe symbol in a friendly way. The blue and yellow colors tell users that Trillian Basic is THE basic tool for all instant messaging needs. To continue our ‘tradition’ of using highly complex illustration as a logo instead of some single-colored shapes that lack identity (ironically) these days, the Trillian Basic logo is no simple shape and is highly polished with shiny effects and gradients.

The logo for Trillian Pro may look the same old professional at first sight. The changes were subtle: the inclination of the ‘globe-holder’ has been changed to be consistent with the Basic logo, and the polish was made consistent, too. A slight blue tone was added to create a more personal quality instead of purely silver.

In general, everything is subtly and slightly blue this time, comparing the silvery tone of 1.0 and the midnight gray tone of 2.0. For some strange reasons (and good reasons), we think that 3.0 will be a bright and cheerful version. Blues will blend with whites and silvers gradually. Bold and stark lines are now replaced with blended lines with clear thin edges. The flowing lines motif that has been here since 1.0 is still here, yet takes another shift from thick parallel lines to very fine parallel lines, almost like bank notes or some sort of certificates. And they flow like mountains.

As for fonts of the logos, we remain faithful in the timeless qualities of Helvetica. It is a font adopted by numerous agencies around the world, and it is almost the standard for modernity. Its pristine and ornament-less design will always be radical, and I think by that Trillian will always look trendy. The switch to Helvetica happened during Trillian Pro 1.0, when we decided to make Trillian look less like a Star Wars video game by removing the custom graphic font (which originated from Serpentine font used by our original designer Ryan. From then on, Trillian always look Pro, with an Expanded Oblique twist, which retains certain playfulness, movement and lightness of the product. You will see oblique fonts still being used around the software.

To emphasize the new-ness of “3″, the size of the number will be a lot bigger than the word Trillian. Since the logo itself is enough to differentiate Basic and Pro, I used an outlined font for the words “Basic” and “Pro”.

Well, that should be enough for now. The rest of time for you should be spent on drooling in front of the logos.