and Kid is working on some new “Weather Functionality.” So here’s your first screenshot.

Build 8 today. Build 9 tomorrow.

Our recent mission has been to make Trillian faster and smaller, and we’ve had some pretty exciting results so far. In the past, we’ve tied our speed parties into beta testing – a bad idea, as it restricts us from being able to rewrite huge chunks of already-tested code, even if we know it’s slow.

So. This time we’re doing it before anyone gets their hands on a build. The numbers are pretty impressive – we have literally shaved multiple seconds off of startup time, and are working to drop VM size down as low as it can go. I can report that the build I’m running right now actually loads up Trillian Whistler FASTER than it loads up Trillian Cordillera (the ancient and beautiful 0.74 skin that basically does nothing). In addition, we are hoping to cut 5-10MB off of our overall memory consumption from 3.1. We’ll see how we end up there – we’ve already made some great progress, but we are far from finished.

Anyhow, thought that would be exciting news for all the geeks.

PA is the best. World of Warcraft: The Time Vortex. Who knew? If anyone plays on Perenolde, I will totally kick your ass in a duel. Priests FTW.

Chugging along – we’re currently at build 7 and have been compiling new builds roughly every Monday, give or take a few days. We are now using the build full-time and are really enjoying a few of the new minor features. The little things always make the biggest difference.

I am estimating that we’ll be at or around build 10-15 when we begin sending a few early alpha copies out for round 1 of testing. Our current schedule looks something like:

• Finish up colocation work – we’re moving some cabinets around, etc. There will be no service impact to Trillian or the websites.
• Keep churning out the builds. Of particular emphasis right now is reducing memory consumption and improving speed, in addition to the usual round of bug slaughtering.
• ???
• Profit!

Stay tuned…