A major feature debuts this week in Build 65. Continuing our efforts to renew the overall interface of Trillian, we tackled the area where it matters most: the message display. The new “Message Views” feature, also affectionately known as the “Bubble View”, will put the fun back into function by allowing you to switch between many different appearances and layouts for your instant message conversations!

Although similar functionality has existed in other instant messaging clients, we decided to take the idea one step further by optimizing the layouts for intelligent space usage and increased legibility:

• Combined bubbles with separators: Multiple messages from the same person will be clamped together as one bubble, neatly divided by subtle separators.
• Show only one avatar: Instead of repeating the avatar for every single message, we show only one. This reduces repetitiveness and visual clutter, saves (a lot of) space, yet messages remain identifiable. It looks great, too.
• Color Themes support: Dark themes totally rock now!
• Auto-History: Messages from the last conversations will have a dimmer bubble.
• Space efficiency: Worried about losing too much space for the elegance? No problem! Our design is much more efficient than most message view styles out on the Internet.
• Quick switching between views: You can currently switch between normal “Playscript” view and the new Bubble view quickly through Preferences -> Text Conversations.
• Copy & Paste and Image Pasting continues to work perfectly. (A lot of work was done to ensure these features remained consistent!)

To enable this feature, go to Preferences -> Text Conversations, and check the first option.

More improvements on Message Views are coming up in future builds. Currently, the new view is available for Cordonata only, and timestamps are missing in the new view, but they will be added back very soon. We will also have more concise system messages, and we will be fine-tuning the layout for better legibility as the builds progress. We need your feedback, so please let us know what you think and where we can improve the new Message View further on our forums.

Enjoy your weekend!

New builds for Win32 and Mac OS X today. Build 64 is a quick bugfix build focusing primarily on fixing some outstanding crashes, but we’ve also finally re-enabled proxy support! We expect a few more problems with our proxy code, so please test it in your environment and let us know if things aren’t functioning. Build 6 continues some internal structural work as we prepare to bring more exciting features up to the user interface.

We also added a new Business Card Widget, and updated our existing Travel Map USA Widget to allow easier editing.

The office will be closed Thursday and Friday of this week in observance of the holiday.  We wish all our American friends a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

There will be no Mac OS X build today; build day this week is on Wednesday to try and get several more things in before the upcoming (American) holiday.

See you all in two days.

Build 63 is now available. As of this build, all of our network plugins have been fully ported to the new IMCore system and are available on all platforms – Win32, Web, and OS X. We’ve fixed a number of the outstanding issues in the Jabber and Google Talk plugins, and Gmail users should appreciate the new mail integration with their contact list.

Finalizing all of our network plugins is a significant milestone for Trillian Astra on the road to a public beta test. We will be working on proxy support and a few more UI enhancements next week, and following that we will be beginning work on our audio/video integration. There are still a few minor features we’re hoping to add into Astra before beta – if you’re still waiting on a particular feature to be implemented, be sure it’s in Bugzilla and vote for it! Once our beta testing begins we will focusing exclusively on performance and bugfixes, so now is the time to suggest a feature. Of course, there’s always Trillian 4.1, so don’t be upset if your favorite feature didn’t get implemented by the time we reach beta.

Enjoy the build!

Is now available. Though the majority of work right now is in finishing the conversion of all mediums to the new IMCore, this week’s build of Trillian OS X also has a fair amount of back-end work on the skin engine.

The engine now supports animated overlays (very important for things like the little animated text atop a chat bubble during a typing notification), multiple offset overlays (useful for the ‘encrypted’ notification graphic atop chat tabs), and tinting of layers. Other areas of the skin engine have been shaved down a bit in terms of efficiency and memory usage, as we migrate towards using a single instance of a bitmap in every skin that references it. Skin engine cleanup should be finished by build 6.

But just to have one visible end-change, tooltips have now been pulled through to the UI! All the lovely Windows-style tooltips, with client information, capabilities, status, online time and all of that now will show up in the OS X build.

See you all on Friday!