After a slightly extended maintenance window today (phew!), Build 28 is now available. A fair amount of time this week was spent laying the groundwork for some of our upcoming features and ideas, including some important protocol changes to ensure your data is secure and protected. Fans of eye candy will be happy to hear that the skinning language now supports the Windows Vista Glass feature!

Next week we’ll be shifting focus back to some exciting web features. Stay tuned!

To sign up for Trillian Astra Beta, please visit our signup page.

Installing WordPress was just as easy as they said it would be. We’re busy spring cleaning our server installations and website software and the blog was overdue for an update. We’ll be snazzing up the design down the road; for now, it’s back to *real* work! See you on Friday.

Build 27 is now available for your testing pleasure. Registered testers should follow the instructions contained in their invitation e-mail to update to the latest build. A handful of bugs were squashed this week, and we’ve also started the process of sneaking some cool new features into these incremental builds!

Widget Updaters: With updaters, profile elements like your timezone and currently playing song can be automatically detected and updated by Trillian without any manual intervention whatsoever.

Quick Edit: We’ve also added a cool “quick edit” zone in the contact list where the most commonly-changed profile items can be modified. This is useful, for example, to change your mood without going into a larger preferences dialog.

On the web front, everything now boasts sexy smooth-scrolling (contact lists and chat windows) and we’ve added basic sounds and incredible vector emoticons!

More to come next week. We’ll be adding additional testers throughout this evening and the weekend. Have a LOVELY day!

A new Astra build is available today. Changelog here.

We’ll be adding more testers later today once things settle down. Build 26 is basically a bunch of bugfixes – next week we’ll be putting a slight emphasis on some new functionality in addition to the usual round of bugfixing.

Thanks!