Happy holidays to everyone from all of us here at Cerulean Studios! Here’s hoping you’re enjoying some quality time with the family, cooking a turkey (or acceptable vegetarian substitute), and poking around with your favorite new electronic gadget!

It’s been a month now since we released the first alpha builds of Trillian 3.0, both Basic and Pro, and the bug database empties further with every build. As we near the end of the 3.0 test cycle, it’s interesting to take a look back.

Hopefully, the testing process has worked well for our users this time around. Having only a limited number of people with access to the bug database helped the developers keep our sanity and avoid having too many duplicate bug submissions, but we hoped that having public access to the preview builds would help satisfy the curiosity of many of our user community. Though there’s no release date for 3.0 yet, it’s definitely drawing closer; fewer and fewer bugs are reported, and when we feel fairly confident there are no other ones lurking, then 3.0 will be released.

So where do we go from here? What’s ahead for Trillian, and where do we go next?

Architecturally, this release marks the culmination of a number of major changes to Trillian’s internals which began as early as 2.0. We’ve added Unicode support to allow international text, and pulled that through the system. We’ve improved the plugin API to the point that everything — including the audio/video engine! — has been rewritten to act as a plugin now. And of course, we’ve finished the long-promised merge of the Pro and Basic codebases, so that Basic will stay current with Pro now.

This has had an interesting, and somewhat unfortunate, side effect; when you make a sweeping change throughout the entire product, such as Unicode support or removing the component system, you end up having to touch every little bit of code. This has made it more difficult to do incremental releases while we’ve been re-architecting the system, and has caused things like the big year-long jumps to 2.0 and 3.0.

Already as we finish the last bugs in 3.0, we have features we’ve each planned out for 3.1; some are feature requests from users on the forums, others are things we’ve wanted to do ourselves and simply couldn’t get into 3.0. Already there’s a bit of thought being put into the possibility of using UPnP methods to determine router settings and improve file transfer, and to the best way to integrate HTML profiles into the ‘My Information’ section and have them export, for instance, to the AIM servers properly. Scott’s also planning to add some new functionality to the Yahoo file transfer which should make it more reliable behind firewalls. We’re trying to keep 3.1’s to-do list relatively small, however, so that it can be a shorter development cycle.

The journey to reach 3.0 has been an interesting road. There’s been interesting scenery, and occasional bumps in the road, but hopefully everyone else has been enjoying the trip as well; there’s still plenty of gas in the tank and the road ahead looks interesting as we head on into 2005.