Following up on the improvements to the profile viewer, during the last two weeks we’ve been preparing a new Profile Editor for Build 57. We’ve been working days and nights to complete this feature – it is an important component of the Astra profile system, and its completion will eliminate a major milestone towards a feature-complete Trillian Astra. Auto-update should be firing for this build in the next few hours; please note that you may have to reconfigure your widgets as of Build 57.

The Trillian Cobalt skin does not have any of these upgrades yet. We will be working on it this week!

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We’re back to work on some features and will need more time before a build is ready.  Thanks for your patience and support, and please keep the bug reports coming!

Is now available. You can now fully customize the knowledge bar that appears on the top of your message windows, and the MySpace IM plugin has been resurrected.

Enjoy the build!

Is now available. We spent most of the shortened week resolving the major bugs from build 54, interrupted shortly when we had to drag Apache behind the shed and feed it a bullet. Sad times.More importantly, this week we’re introducing the first component of Trillian Astra’s revamped profile and user information system! The Cordonata skin (Cobalt will follow next week) now supports native profile browsing for AIM, ICQ, and ASTRA. Instead of defaulting you to a webpage, we’ve tried to bring you the best of both worlds – elegant and useful summarization detail within the message window, followed by an option to open a web browser if you so desire. Please let us know in the comments and forums if you have any ideas or suggestions for this new feature.

Auto-update should be firing for this build; you should therefore be receiving an auto-update notification sometime in the next few hours prompting you to update your copy of Trillian Astra. Enjoy the new build!

Invites will be going out to all Pro customers who signed up to be alpha testers as of this morning, staged throughout this week and next. Please watch your inboxes for invites (from the ceruleanstudios.com domain); we’re looking forward to hearing all of your feedback, both positive and negative! Don’t be shy when submitting bugs and feature requests to Bugzilla, and please carefully read your invitation e-mail to ensure you’re up-to-speed on the current limitations and flaws of the alpha. Major items we haven’t (re-)added yet include but are not limited to full mail alert integration, voice/video, web profiles, MSN/Jabber/Google on Web/iPhone, a proper upgrade and installation wizard, etc. This build is still considered alpha quality and therefore feature incomplete.

Invitations will continue on their normal schedule for non-Pro customers as well. You do not need to be a paying customer to join the testing team, but we’re fast tracking Pro invitations to thank those of you that continue to keep us in business. If you’re a current or past Trillian Pro customer and did not submit your information to our alpha signup form, please do so now and we’ll be sure to get you into the team over the next week or two.

Once we have a chance to hear from our paying customers we’ll move more aggressively towards an open public beta (feature-frozen except for emergencies/horrendous oversights) and an invitation system so you can get some of your friends and family on Trillian Astra.

One caveat: this is the largest batch of invitations we’ve sent out thus far, and we are staging them accordingly. If we notice a major server explosion during any stage of the invites, we’ll halt further invites until the problems have been tracked down and resolved. We will update the blog if this happens so you’re aware and so you don’t expect an e-mail that isn’t coming.

Thank you for your patience and support, and we hope you enjoy testing the new build! Remember that we release builds roughly every week, so keep checking back with the blog for news and updates. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves before reaching beta!