Build 44 is now available, and we’re happy to announce that Trillian was selected as a finalist in Webware’s “Webware 100″, a poll representing the best products in the Web 2.0 space. We are honored to be selected and included in a group alongside many wonderful products; please consider showing your support and casting a vote for Trillian!

Build 44 showcases more bugfixes and we’ve also added some cool new desktop widgets. We’re continuing to flesh out the widget API and hope to release the specifications for it soon. Our goal is to make widgets as easy to build as possible, and we want to make sure we have all of our bases covered before we release the first revision of documentation and development tools. Of particular note this week is our cool new Twitter widget! Those of you who are fanatically updating your Twitter accounts with your every move can now use this new widget to watch yourself or anyone else on your desktop, in your contact list, etc. We plan on enhancing the widget further with the ability to actually update your Twitter account in a future revision.

Lastly, server work continues to progress; this week we actually reached a major development milestone in that some of our newer code was finally put to the test under the watchful eye of load-generating “flamethrowers”, and we’re hopeful that all of the new updates will continue to hold up under stress. See you next week!

We’ve shifted the focus back to cleaning up Bugzilla a bit; this week’s Build 43 is primarily a bugfix build. Server stability and enhancement work continues and is coming along nicely, and with its ultimate completion we will hopefully knock out the dreaded bug 465 as well. The performance and stability of Trillian Astra’s server-side is very important to us for obvious reasons; noone wants their service to collapse once it sees some real load, and we definitely don’t subscribe to the “build now, scale later” philosophy at Cerulean Studios. Scaling issues should be surprises to everyone involved and not the result of engineering oversight, laziness, or incompetence.

Reminders for those of you still waiting to get your hands on Astra:

• When the server-side stabilizes a few more notches, we’ll open the testing up to a larger group (in the multi-thousands).
• All current and past Pro customers will get their chance to experiment with the alpha before we feature-freeze.

Enjoy the build. We’ll see you next week!

Thanks a lot for your patience! Fortunately, we took only a couple weeks and not 7.5 million years to discover the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything…

We’re still working on something special for Build 42, so there will be no build this week. We’ve also been preoccupied with the recent security fixes for Trillian 3.1 and the proper execution of releasing the update via our auto-update system. Even though the system has been in place for years and has been heavily-tested, we always manage to find a bug at the last minute when it really matters the most. The last thing we ever want to have happen is to automatically push out a broken update on thousands of Trillian users – ugh – so we take our time with the testing of each and every update.

In addition to some exciting new client features, we’re steadily working on a large amount of stability and reliability improvements for both client and server code. Much of this code never makes its way into a “RESOLVED” Bugzilla entry or even to the changelogs we post with each new build, but we felt it was important to remind everyone that we’re constantly working on improving the alpha with each build. Sometimes the lack of obvious “fixed” entities can be misleading, but rest assured that our primary focus is stability – features are useless if they don’t work!

In order of importance, we are currently working on:

• Server stability and scaling improvements – very high priority.
• The remaining 3-6 major features we’ve scheduled for the final release.
• Bugs.

Once we knock out all features, we’ll switch to a full beta test and halt the development of any features, focusing exclusively on bugs, performance, and marketing (updated websites and such). The exciting part about an alpha test is that we don’t focus TOO much on actual “bugs” and there’s still a chance for everyone to get their minor feature requests thrown into the system and possibly implemented. For this reason, we’ll be keeping the alpha test open at least until all Pro customers have their crack at testing it and making suggestions for the upcoming version.

Enjoy your weekend!

As mentioned in the last blog, we fixed 4 vulnerabilities in Trillian 3.1 with our new 3.1.5.1 release. The links to the specific advisories are below:

• ZDI-CAN-169: Trillian Pro Rendezvous XMPP HTML Decoding Heap Corruption Vulnerability
• iDefense: Trillian Multiple IRC Vulnerabilities

All of these vulnerabilities have been addressed in version 3.1.5.1 and we encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest version. We will be rolling out an auto-update for our existing customers shortly.

Special thanks to both the ZDI and iDefense teams for their assistance in reporting and resolving these issues; we’ve worked with a handful of vulnerability research firms in the past, and I can happily say that these folks are both top-notch researchers and extremely professional. We look forward to continuing our relationship with them both to ensure we bring you the most secure and error-free software possible!