I kept a stack of sketches of imaginary features in a cerulean blue folder. Some of the features in 3.0 could be dated way back to year 2002. I am actually surprised that the feature is so obvious but no other messengers have implemented.

Inspirations come from everywhere. The most obvious source is the Trillian Forums Feature Requests. I usually go down the list with the most posts first and then downwards. People have a lot of interesting ideas and the idea becomes more sophisticated as more contributions come in. My job is mainly about organizing them so it integrates back to the whole user interface in a meaningful way. Looking at other messenger helps too, but copying features is a no-no to me, if the feature is not being understood and known how it is related to what we have.

Understanding what each feature does is an important part of the design process, and I tried to read books about user interfaces and semiotics and communication psychology and design psychology (and blah to make it sound like I read a lot but not really) to get a better idea of what I’m actually designing. It helps thinking what Trillian is really about in a long run. We all know that at a certain point that text messaging may eventually go out-dated, unless we are able to grasp the significance of it.

Sometimes inspirations come from looking at how things display information. Watching BBC World is great, especially those screens between commercials. The more obvious inspiration is the introduction of medium globes, a design decision we are forced to use due to legal restrictions, which the colors of circles come from the London Underground subway lines. When I was in London last month, I kept thinking that Piccadilly line is for MSN Messenger.

Some of you on the forums were talking about the feature shown below. I thought I’d take this opportunity to let you know that we’d already taken care of it. How great minds think alike!

We spent this week making sure Trillian 3 runs “well” on Win98, WinME, and Win2k. We spent the better part of Monday and Tuesday trying to track down a weird speed issue – on a particular WinME box, the contact list was scrolling ridiculously slow. After many hours of torture, we sped a particular routine up from 5ms to 0.8ms. Nothing changed. Mind you, we’ve got these cool timer macros that let us know exactly how long a particular routine takes, etc, and we immediately jumped to the conclusion that some of our code sucked, hence the speed party.

It turns out we should have just looked at our CPU. There was a runaway thread checking for some weird WinXP capability (that was obviously not around under WinME) taking up 99% of the CPU. Once we fixed that, everything started running super fast – so we gained the benefit of our speed-up code anyhow. Let’s hope someone out there with an older PC notices.

Thanks to Scott Markwell for pointing out a brilliant theory that should help clear everything up.

Over the years, and especially since the advent of the internet, many of us have grown to despise all forms of advertising. In my mind, the most effective form of advertising (or at least the form that I’ll always welcome into my life) is sometimes called “word of mouth”. If a friend tells me about Product A or Product B, it always (depending on the friend!) holds more clout over the banner ad or obnoxious popup I receive. Admittedly, I have listened to Survivor much more after watching the Starbucks commercial, and occasionally purchase products based on more “conventional” advertising.

Cerulean Studios has never spent any money on ads, whether it be banners, direct marketing, or anything else. It is our firm belief that if we develop a solid product, people will spread the word on their own. With 3.0 just around the corner, I am confident that this form of advertising will continue, as both Trillian Basic and Pro are getting a significant boost in features. So thank you all of you past and future marketers!