Please use the below form to sign up for Trillian Astra alpha testing. There is no guarantee that you will be selected should we receive too many responses for a given testing period, but all names will be considered as long as there are available slots. Eventually testing will be open to the general public, so everyone will get a crack at the build long-term.

Pro member names are optional. Please fill out the rest, and let us know a little bit about yourself and your testing environment in the provided blurb field (OS, CPU specs, etc). Thanks!

Moved: Please sign up in this post.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words and excitement. We’re going to work our hardest to make sure Trillian 4 is the greatest release yet!

As we’ve underestimated the number of you who are interested in alpha testing, tomorrow we will open up a registration script for an easier and more official way to get your name in the hat. The ranking we’ll use to determine alpha testing eligibility will look something like:

1) Emailed me long ago
2) Pro customer, expired or not
3) Wrote a snazzy description of yourself and why you should be a tester
4) Numerical rank (FIFO)

I’ll keep the blog updated with our schedule as well so you all know what we’re up to and when to expect new builds and fresh recruits into the team.

Hope everyone in the US enjoyed their turkey day. Look for a post tomorrow with more tester details.

Hi all,

Today we are unveiling the sneak preview of the first public alpha version of Trillian Astra, our codename for Trillian 4.0.

The current build is 21. From this point forward, it is our goal to release builds every 2-3 weeks or earlier should the situation demand it.

Some of you have noticed that trillianastra.com is down. This was a side-effect of recent server changes we made and was intentional. It will be back up within a few weeks. We’re slowly moving away from an older server cluster and we took the opportunity to bring trillianastra.com down now before it was receiving too much traffic.

If you are an early adopter and are interested in joining the team:

Please take note of the following important information snippets:

• Remember that alpha software will crash and may cease functioning entirely during testing!
• The team will be expanded next week or the week after that (after the US Thanksgiving holiday dies down) to include the first batch of those of you that expressed interest in joining the alpha team.
• The product is currently an alpha, which means it is not feature complete. Notable absences include voice and video support, for example. These features were purposefully removed to allow our testers to focus their efforts on a smaller subset of technology before moving forward.
• If you have a pet feature request, now is the time to bring it to our attention! We are still actively enhancing the product and writing new features, so please participate if you have something to say.

Why are we releasing the sneak preview if we’re still adding features?

This is new for us, but we’re opening Trillian to public feedback at an earlier stage in our development cycle to encourage more user involvement when it counts the most. We want Trillian to satisfy as many of your communication requirements as possible, and the best way to do that is to work together at building the software. It’s easier for us to make changes now than it is during a beta cycle, for example, and we’re hoping we can build the best Trillian to date! Outstanding bugs that never seem to make it to our attention will have their chance to now, and features you feel are incredibly important but have been neglected can finally be evaluated and reviewed during development, not after.

Please continue to track our progress on this blog and submit your feedback and suggestions! We hope you enjoy the new build and thank you for your continued support.