A cool (but large) screenshot of the Trillian Cobalt skin in minimal mode with the “Automatically resize the contact list to fit the content” preference on. 70% transparency. A nice minimalistic alternative for those of you who are into that kind of thing.

Put some larger screenshots up today here for your viewing pleasure. These are largely out-of-date already due to the fast-paced nature of an alpha product, but they get the point across.

Our internal testing is moving along smoothly, and current plans are to open the doors to a larger testing base the first week of January. Given the rush around the office during the holiday seasons we felt it best to avoid a larger scale test when we’re not 100% staffed. We are continuing to build new features and fix existing ones in the meantime.

Many of you have expressed interest in helping us translate the new Trillian Astra into your language. In response, we’re hosting a special wiki to make this process easier and more collaborative – check it out here. Our very own Don Petty has been slaving to the grind, Skid Row style, to get as many language templates flushed out as possible.

We’ve also written some tools to export the wiki data into native Trillian language pack formats (XML files and Win32 resource files), so once a language pack hits 100% completion we’ll host it online and it will automatically appear inside of Trillian. This is another cool feature we’ve done for Astra – server hosted language packs and automatic language pack download – so your language will appear to everyone!

If you speak another language and have a few minutes, feel free to drop by and contribute a few translations. Don’t forget to add your name to the contributors list!