Hi all,

Some specific responses to blog comments:

- Skins: Yes, T4 will be showcasing quite a few new UI enhancements and updated skins. We’re showing you Whistler screenshots because the new skins aren’t ready to be seen quite yet. Kid has been working hard on a pair of new skins and they are both absolutely stunning.

- Folder transfers: We’ve added a cool new auto-zip feature for file transfers, so when you select a handful of files Trillian will zip them for you. We felt that since not all protocols supported the concept of folder transfer, but everyone can unzip a file, that this solution was best. It fails only when you’re pirating large movies at 600MB/piece and zipping them might eat all your HD space, but we hope you aren’t doing that.

- FT Resume: Also been improved wherever possible. For example, AIM checksums file transfers to ensure that both ends participating in a resume session have the same file. We didn’t handle this properly in the past but we do now, so for example if you have cat.jpg at 5000 bytes and your friend sends you cat.jpg, an 8000 byte file of a totally different cat, Trillian won’t blindly start appending to the end of your original cat.jpg as the checksum will fail.

- Competition: Our competition is as dynamic as you would expect – they will varyingly catch up to us and lag behind us at the same time. We expect nothing less and work hard to keep Trillian in great form; our hands are quite full with T4 and we think you’ll all be very pleased with the results.

We are currently packaging internal build 20 and are targetting a public sneak preview of the alpha as well as inducting more testers into the team within the next 1-2 builds.

Thanks!

Been working hard on ensuring file transfers work even better in the next release of Trillian. We’ve redesigned the window a bit, too – pushing the “More” button in the below screenshot will provide you with additional, technical information that will help you diagnose FT failures. Names removed to protect the innocent. You’ll also notice a cool new feature “Time Taken” – we always walk away from the PC while file transfers are running, and thought it would be useful to know how long it took for a transfer to complete.

We also support image previews when possible (Yahoo, MSN).

More dump example:

*** Attempting to send C:\Documents and Settings\smw\My Documents\Trillian Folder.ico to bob.
*** Notice: We are hosting the connection for this file transfer on port 1241.
*** Notice: bob could not connect to us, and has requested we connect to his or her machine at 192.168.0.4:3805.
*** Notice: We failed to connect to bob. We are now attempting to connect to an alternate IP address and port, 1.2.3.4:3805.
*** Notice: All avenues of connecting directly to bob have been exhausted. We are now requesting a server-proxied file transfer.

In general, we’re trying to stuff as much geeky information into the “More” window as possible, to ensure that if a file transfer fails you know exactly why. This will help us fix it when possible, or help you realize your situation is hopeless (restrictive firewalls and no ability to proxy the transfer, perhaps) as-is so that you can work around it. Will be very attentive to feedback during testing as we’d love to get this 100%!