Just when you think things cannot get any better… they can!
Today we will be releasing Build 38, featuring a few great new features that will make your contact list a pleasure to use and transform your desktop into a state-of-the-art instant messaging machine.
We have completely revamped our basic set of service icons in order to suit the new image of Trillian Astra. Unlike their predecessors (which were also all drawn in vectors), our new icons stretch beyond 48×48 and are completely scalable and ready for Flash. Additionally, they are drawn to spec for Windows Vista and have coherent perspective and lighting. The glass quality of the new spheres complements perfectly with the translucent metallic surfaces of the Trillian Cordonata skin.
To solve the problem of having way too many subway lines, we introduced duotone spheres in Trillian 3.0. This concept was applied mostly to secondary IM services and worked well for a long time. We ultimately decided to color the Astra service with green and blue (the colors of our dear planet Earth and the colors of the two spheres in our logo), and, as a result, the new icons have a more explicit division between the two colors, forming a sphere somewhat resembling a yin-yang. It should be easier to differentiate between Astra and ICQ now, as ICQ is pushed towards a more yellowish tone.
To showcase these new icons in their most glorious form, we’ve added a new contact list layout without avatars. In addition to lowering visual noise, this layout has the added benefit of bringing the contact list focus back to representing a contact by status.
In response to the enthusiasm of our alpha testers, we added a few features with the highest vote count from our Bugzilla database. First and foremost, you can now sort your contact list by the size of the log file. This has the effect of placing all your BFFs at the top of your contact list, as those are ideally the people you communicate with the most. Secondly, you can now preview your latest messages by glancing at your Windows taskbar, which has also been enhanced to show you how many new messages you’ve received from your message windows. Lastly, skin development could not get any easier, as we’ve added the main Trillian menus into our right click menu for the contact list!
We will also roll out icons for not only secondary but also third-party IM services in the coming weeks, as a sincere thanks for those who have supported and invested in Trillian.
Hello all Trillianites in New York City! Our Trillian Users Meetup is coming up in 3 days! This will be a great chance to meet other Trillian users, make new friends and share your Trillian love!
In the event of rain, we will meet up at Starbucks Coffee (map) at the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, right across the street.
We will send out confirmation emails in the next few hours to those who RSVP-ed. If you would like to come, please RSVP by sending us an email at meetup [at] ceruleanstudios.com.
So we spent Monday and Tuesday playing with the public alpha of Adobe’s new Apollo technology and now have Astra working with it. This is technology similar in what it ultimately provides to the user as our in-house “OS Layer” code. Apollo, in a nutshell, allows a piece of Flash code to run natively on your operating system as an actual application with its own taskbar entry and native OS feel. It also supports Windows and OSX.
The Good
Immediate support for Win32 and OSX; future support mentioned for Linux and mobile devices.
Good memory footprint and CPU usage.
Easily snapped into an existing Flex project (which we were not using previously, and had to learn).
Multiple window support.
Easy installation.
The Bad
We don’t control the underlying technology, so are limited to providing only the functionality that Adobe chooses to expose. For example, in the current build, we have no systray icon support, no docking support, and are unable, outside of filesystem access, to communicate with other non-Apollo applications using standard OS mechanisms such as a window handle or COM.
Due to what we believe is related to an existing Flash transparency problem (which we have since received confirmation from Adobe about), TextField objects in Apollo lose their ClearType setting. We hope this is fixed eventually now that Adobe’s own product lines depend on it.
Requires an actual installer download and permanent installation process – the Apollo application exists in your Add/Remove programs listing and takes its own directory on your computer. This was not what we had hoped for, and tends to create an ambiguous installation environment for an existing Trillian/Win32 user.
A somewhat large runtime; our OS Layer plugin is 84K, as it barely does anything – in comparison, Apollo is a few megabytes.
Ultimately, the “Good” points for Apollo are very strong and outweigh the bad, in our opinion; it’s a non-trivial operation to get your application to run natively on OSX, but fixing a weird font transparency issue or adding systray icon support can easily come in time. Our biggest concern at this point is the ambiguity that we’d introduce by providing Trillian users two ways to install the same application, one of which was the obvious weaker offering (no plugins, less preferences, etc). If Trillian Astra itself is able to store most of your data server-side to ensure full client mobility, and we can keep the main installer reasonably lightweight, what’s the point of installing something else? This is our current thinking, anyhow. We’ll continue to evaluate the technology as we move forward and figure out what makes the most sense for our customers.
Is now available. Thanks to everyone for your feedback and suggestions re: our OS Layer video from last week. We’re going to continue to flesh out the functionality and work towards getting an early alpha in the hands of the testers in an upcoming release. For now, we’re continuing to fix bugs and flesh out the server-side as well. Much of our time this week and last was spent improving some of the bottlenecks we’ve identified on the servers, so unfortunately fixes like these don’t end up on your desktop. They are, however, very important!
Secondly, we’ve opened up the voting system inside of Bugzilla so that testers can place their votes on important feature requests. When we trim the bug list, or periodically if we’re bored, we’ll look for the top-ranked feature requests and take a crack at implementing them during the alpha phase. Once we reach beta we will no longer be coding *any* features, but for now please use your votes so we know where to focus our energies! You can vote on a bug too if we’re stubbornly refusing to fix it.
By now, those of you currently involved in our alpha program have probably had the opportunity to play around with our web-based IM offering over at http://www.trillianastra.com. The point of this product is to provide useful IM access to Trillian users that aren’t at their main PC without the bulk of carrying around a USB key or, even worse, re-downloading Trillian wherever they go. There are, however, some obvious flaws in web-based applications:
The web application is stuck inside the browser. We love our web browser, but when you stuff an application inside of it you tend to lose more functionality than you think. Most people make this sacrifice because the convenience of the web app outweighs the functionality loss – your system tray and task bar notifications, the ability to minimize an application without minimizing 15 others, the ability to use aesthetically pleasing skins and skinned windows without the bulk of a browser frame, etc.
Web products do not necessarily integrate well with their host operating system. Trillian supports a plugin archtecture that lets you do all sorts of whacky things: track your music, invoke text-to-speech frontends, display your CPU utilization and speed, and more. We can also log your conversations directly to the hard drive, expose an XML-based skinning language that supports per-pixel transparency, layered windows, borderless windows, and in general take full advantage of OS-specific rendering features, natively. Although many of these graphical goodies are available on the web, they are typically constrained by the browser window. This is no fun.
We are therefore proud to present our first crack at solving some of these problems, with what we’re currently referring to as our “OS Layer” technology. Take a look below and let us know what you think – we’d love to hear your feedback, comments and suggestions! This is still internal technology (not a part of our alpha program) but we want to be sure we’re heading down the right road before giving it too many cycles.
Some technical information:
This is not powered by Adobe Apollo technology. While we have heard more and more about Apollo in recent weeks, it has not been made available to us and we have never tried it. We work long and devoted hours in a small office building in Brookfield, CT; not being piped into the Silicon Valley hype machine does have its disadvantages, we suppose, but it only makes us work harder! This is all technology developed here at Cerulean Studios.
This technology, like Trillian Astra Web before it, requires Flash 9.
This is the real deal – with it, we can access the system tray, task bar, the local filesystem, dock the contact list, etc. The goal of this project is to emulate 99% of common Trillian functionality in something incredibly lightweight and easy to grab on-the-go. While we won’t likely be doing anything incredibly advanced here (that’s what Trillian “regular” is for), we will strive to do enough to make it worth your while.
This is currently internal technology and not available yet to anyone. It will be made available to our team of testers as soon as its ready, but at this point your feedback and suggestions would be great!
