New in Trillian 4.1: Powerful new Twitter and Facebook features!
One of the major new additions to Trillian Astra has been integration with Twitter and Facebook, helping you keep all of your online life neatly organized in a single application. We’ve taken some time to evaluate customer feedback after our 4.0 release and have come up with a great list of new features to improve Trillian’s user interface as it relates to the social web!
New Layout for News Feeds
Links everywhere. The contact list, info card controls, and notification windows now all support linking! Not only are standard HTTP links recognized, but Trillian also links Twitter hash tags and @replies!
Scroll to see more in info cards. You can now use scrollbars directly within info cards when information overflows. We’ve also improved the positioning of the info card controls to make them easier to manipulate and use throughout all of Trillian.
Avatars everywhere. Notification windows and the contact list itself now support the rendering of user pictures whenever possible, making your Twitter and Facebook experiences much more personable. Tweet notifications also support our new notification combination feature as displayed earlier this week with mail.
Diff’rent views. What might be right for you, may not be right for some – Trillian now supports different views for Mail, News, and Contacts. You can keep your Twitter and Facebook feed a compact “simple” view while using large icons for your contacts, and vice versa!
New Twitter Features on the Contact List
Twitter searches can now be monitored directly inside the contact list, giving you a handy way to track in realtime what people are saying about a particular search result. Displayed in your contact list and via notification alerts!
Tweet right from the contact list. As we mentioned yesterday, you can now tweet right from the Contact List status box at your option, complete with a character count.
Tip: Monitor news with floaters! One exciting (and very old) feature of Trillian is to let you drag parts of your contact list out to an always visible “floater” window. Combining this functionality with Twitter provides an excellent solution for monitoring breaking news in real-time, from a Woot! Off or a big news event.
Twitter Contact Management
Tip: Categorize newsbots, friends and the ignore list. Trillian supports a simple ignore list to filter out tweets from users you’d rather not follow. You can also categorize your Twitter contacts into separate lists! For example, you can separate Twitter contacts who post constantly, which we call “Newsbots”, into a separate list. Your normal Twitter list will not be flooded by these high-traffic tweeters, enabling you to pay attention to what’s important.
You can now follow and unfollow Twitter users directly from within Trillian.
New Twitter Features in the Tweet Window
Twitpic integration. You can now drag images or (Pro users only) use our screen capture feature to include images directly in your Tweets. Trillian automatically handles the upload to Twitpic and subsequent linking.
Character count. The send button will now update with the number of remaining characters available to you on a per-service basis. This comes in special handy when working with size-restricted services such as Twitter. The character count automatically updates when linking services are used as well.
bit.ly and TinyURL integration. Trillian 4.1 also supports bit.ly as a link shortener for Twitter. You can type in your bit.ly username and password for more bit.ly features.
Confirm before retweet. Retweeting will now open up a chat window so you can edit the text before sending.
Stream API Support. Trillian 4.1 supports Facebook’s new stream API, and features additional improvements to private messaging on Facebook. All of the standard features from within your Facebook stream are now automatically pulled into Trillian’s contact list.
With Trillian 4.1, Facebook and Twitter become even easier to use and more directly integrated into the overall product vision. We still have a large number of ideas and feature requests to implement and will continue to work hard on improving Trillian. Stay tuned to our blog as we continue to unveil our newest ideas and thinking. We’ll be back next week with more information on Trillian 4.1’s release date to testers – thanks for your support and interest and we hope you enjoyed this week’s feature preview. :D
September 24th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
wohow CS it’s getting better and better!!
September 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
will the links also be changeable in color now?
September 24th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Niiice little feature set there, thats gonna be mightily useful, although maybe a bit of word wrapping on the floaters wouldn’t go amiss, 140 characters straight across the screen isn’t how i’d prefer it, or at least try and make sure the little info window on mouseover isn’t then off the screen.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Wow…this will make twittering much easier!!!
I’m really looking foreward to this.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Ooh, scrolling in Infocards, once again, an elegant solution.
Send button switching its text to the number of remaining characters is also cool.
Great additions overall. :]
September 24th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Awesome, purely awesome. I especially like the following function for twitter.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Thanks for listening to our requests – it is good to see the issues reported being addressed. A number of suggestions if I may:
1. It would be nice to have a dedicated @user tab; the search functionality can do this but it would be good to have it built in.
2. please provide integration with http://j.mp as well (it’s still bit.ly under the covers). If possible try to make it configurable and generic so ff.im, is.gd and other popular services could be pulled in. There are plenty of choices I know but it would be nice to have support (w/o user) for the top 5 or 10. Most use a simple http request/reply mode which could be abstracted.
3. Not sure about the 4.1 dates but pretty please, could you backport the character count, even in a simplistic form and the confirm before retweet to the 4.x branch ? This will address some of the most annoying bugs until 4.1 arrives (which could take months).
Thanks!
September 24th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
[...] Wie unschwer zu erkennen ist, bezieht sich dieses Update vor allem auf die Integration von Twitter (und Facebook). Details zu den neuerungen findet man wie immer im Blog von den ceruleanstudios. [...]
September 24th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
So my app will auto update tomorrow????
September 24th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Great new functionalities. This is practically all I would’ve liked to see in version 4.1! Really, really good work from you guys!
Currently I’m using TweetDeck for Twitter functionalities, but that goes straight out of the door once Trillian 4.1 arrives.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
…wishless happy
thank you so much…
September 24th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Wow, I was still excited about 4.0! Now, I’m really looking forward to 4.1! Most companies would have called it a 5.0 release with that many improvements and new features! Thanks for the blog tour!
September 24th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
hahnarama
Um… No, it won’t:
September 24th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Can’t wait! Looks great!
September 24th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Hmm, looks like a god version for twitter users! Nice job CS. Now I have to go find out what the Steam API for Facebook is on my own as you didn’t say…
September 24th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
I just love Trillian. I am going to pay for premium services. Good work.. keep it up. We all support you.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Not sure I like how bloated and overcomplicated Trillian seems to be getting…
September 24th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
How about giving the ability to keep offline contacts in their groups by IM type like when they are online. I would rather not have to see my list of facebook contacts that are off line all the time and would like to be able to close the group. I have over 2000 facebook friends and it is a pain to search for my offline friends that are on other services like ICQ, yahoo, etc.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
This is awesome guys, I use Astra as much as possible to manage my social media. These additions will be much appreciated and will allow me to stay in Astra more. Looking forward to them!
September 24th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
An option to deselect the social networking components during install would be welcome.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
@SLither! then don’t enable the facebook and twitter plugins if you dont want them. And they keep improving the speed, so it shouldn’t be considered bloat. Trillian is not a lightweight loser client, if you want that go to Miranda.
@Steven, actually what you need for that is the ability to right click a contact and say “always show online”. And do you know you can TYPE the persons name you are looking for without scrolling or even opening the offline contacts… just type bob and it will show you only the bob’s in your list… no clicking needed at all.
@Luc… What on earth are you talking about? They are not enabled when you first install it, only Astra is, all the rest of the plugins are disabled until you turn them on.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
@DiamondNRG: Efficiency. I don’t need components I’ll never use installed, but I’m not going to die if said option isn’t there, however it wouldn’t hurt.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
@Luc… then delete them from the plugins page of the preferences, but they will be back everytime you get a new update. I see no reason why these things are taking up too much space on your hard drive… But with that said, I want the sad smiley removed because I don’t use it.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
It would be better if it show(make it visible even when it’s not being selected) the checkbox of facebook chat option so we would know that we are selecting the right one. sometimes when i tried to select the online , it would still in the offline..
September 24th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
@DiamondNRG: Oh don’t worry, these new features aren’t taking any space on my hard drive yet, because, you see, 4.1 isn’t out yet for the general public. Also I believe a full format might solve your ill.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Nice.. if someday i can connect trought proxy at messenger live, or yahoo… i will buy the pro version.. also make avaible to linux (to play at home)
September 25th, 2009 at 1:06 am
Get more Facebook features, twitter sucks with its 140 character limitation, stupid links and external services.
September 25th, 2009 at 1:48 am
These updates are awesome! Can’t wait to jump in! Thank you for keeping us posted!
September 25th, 2009 at 2:22 am
Hi! Will the MAC Client have the same features as 4.1?
September 25th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Sounds well … as long as additional feats can be disabled while not in use; just for means of boot and /or startup time. For my part, I’m neither using Facebook nor Twitter…
September 25th, 2009 at 3:17 am
Will there be any performance enhancements? I accepted sluggish performance during the beta as being par for the course, but in the released version it’s still just as slow – trying to run Astra concurrently with any processor-intensitve app slows the system to an absolute crawl whenever Astra displays a toast. (Giving the other app High processor priority makes matters even worse – it still runs slowly, and the rest of the system practically dies when Trillian decides it wants the processor.)
September 25th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Wow! That’s great! But what about working jabber MUC?
September 25th, 2009 at 3:46 am
Uhm how about working on a ubuntu/linux version?! More and more people turn their back on M$… I work with ubuntu on my netbook but I miss Astra!
September 25th, 2009 at 4:00 am
wow.. respekt.. das ist wirklich was geiles. Trillian Astra wird ja immer wieder besser. Wann kommt denn die Version 4.1 raus?
September 25th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Bring it on! What is the targetted release date?
September 25th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Just came over to Trillian from msn and this is so cool.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:37 am
@Luc, you didn’t even read my post correctly, I was talking about deleting the other plugins you don’t use. Thanks for the lame comment about formatting too, I was obviously making fun of you, not serious.
@Silber, added features to plugins you have disabled won’t affect your startup times.
@Ed, how slow of a processor are you running? I don’t even notice those things on my old machine at work. Obviously at home with Core i7 EE, its not really much of a test. Perhaps you need to pick a lighter skin and turn alphablending transparencies and notifications off. Astra should never be seen as a sluggish program, it FLIES compared to other bloated clients.
@Tommy, they don’t give out release dates, but it does say they will talk about that next week during another blog entry.
September 25th, 2009 at 8:29 am
can’t wait for release date! it’s better than the best, trillian 4.0!
September 25th, 2009 at 8:47 am
I like the fb integration but it’d be nicer if it didn’t log me out every 3 hours, from the astra integration and from the fb site itself
September 25th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Ping.FM integration?
September 25th, 2009 at 9:51 am
So I finally open the annoying pop up figuring that if I go ahead and just get the stupid update then it will stop nagging me EVERY SINGLE TIME I START THE APP. But no, the page that opens doesn’t even have a download link so all I have done IS WASTED MORE TIME.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:12 am
@DiamondNRG: I’ve read all your useless responses correctly. You’re not very good at recognising sarcasm, are you? Regardless I don’t intend to continue this unless you have something meaningful to add.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:33 am
abusliman1020@hotmail.com
September 25th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Where is the 14th picture?.. Anyways, great work guys! I’m sure all tweetfags are pleased…
September 25th, 2009 at 10:53 am
How can I disable these annoying “alerts” that seem to pop up daily? I can’t find any way to disable them, and then I can’t post to the support forums because my account hasn’t been enabled to post anything. I’m getting really sick of Trillian and am just about to go back to Yahoo and AIM for my IM needs…
September 25th, 2009 at 11:17 am
i used it
September 25th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
@saimike – that is because facebook is having server/connection issues. It isn’t specifically an Astra issue.
@Luc .. I just answer people’s questions, call them useless if you want, it just makes you look dumb. Glad your not interested in continuing this, it is off-topic and I have other people to help. Take care sir.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
@DiamondNRG: Celeron M 530 with 2GB of RAM. Other clients can give me notifications without my machine stuttering; why can’t Astra?
September 25th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
@ Ed:
Celeron… that’s half of the problem there. *Grins* Sorry, I’m biased against them.
As DiamondNRG said, try turning some of the more advanced settings down and / or off – that might help fix it.
September 25th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
@Bryan Cowger … go to your trillian preferences to the installation and startup and uncheck the option to be notified of trillian news. Do note they don’t usually write multiple blog posts in a week, this week was an exception.
@Ed … did you try the settings I suggested? That is a pretty weak processor… might need to turn of wiki lookup in message windows, alphablending transparencies and maybe even try the cobalt skin instead.
September 25th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
@Anne Bixler … turn the option off in your preferences, you are the one that chose to be notified of “news” … there can’t be a download link as the 4.1 version is not finished yet.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
For reference: the Alert option is under Installation and Setup in preferences, under “When Trillian loads up”
Just uncheck the last two boxes.
September 25th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
@VE6MSP: Yeah, I know it’s hardly the best processor in the world, but it is almost a Core 2 Solo.
@DiamondNRG: I haven’t tried turning options off – the point is that Trillian 3.1 would run at full speed by default, including Wiki lookup, alpha blending, and notifications. I’m running Windows with full diffuse transparency on my window borders with no slowdown at all. Why is it that Astra is that much slower, if it is not lacking in performance optimisation?
September 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Trillian 3.1 did not have alphablending, so how that be true? Are you running more medium plugins than you used to on 3.1? Also the default skin on Astra is a lot more resource intensive than the default skin on 3.1 was..which is why I suggested the cobalt skin. Sure Astra probably isn’t perfectly optimized yet, but I haven’t seen in run worse than 3.1 in over a year.
September 26th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Wonderful new little features.
i cant wait for this
September 26th, 2009 at 5:27 am
omg guys epic fail with trillian tray ico when win 7 resizes fonts to 125% (e.g. because of resolutions 1600×1200 and higher) – the ico is badly distorted because it doesn’t support size for this setting (and there sure one is, because win tray icos are more than fine).. please include upgraded iconpack in new build
September 26th, 2009 at 7:41 am
@YangombiUmpakati … looks fine on my machine even in the larger size.
September 26th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Twitter Support is great!
September 26th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
I would have just the Trillian Astra for mac osx, thank
September 27th, 2009 at 2:34 am
So when will Trillian Astra 4.1 be released?
September 28th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Thanks for all this great features to come but we’ll don’t know when it will be release ! Hope it will not be as long as Astra
September 28th, 2009 at 5:30 am
Monday is now, i wait for Trillian 4.1 =)
September 28th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Kudos for Trillian Support Desk, they provided an excellent service.!
I had some problems logging in to my account, they found the problem, work together with Development and applied the solution without problems (everything is up & running).
Trillian Support…. Great Job.!
SUP.-
September 28th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Please add support for file transferring in google talk.
Thanks
September 29th, 2009 at 8:15 am
that’s sucks this trillian bitch
September 30th, 2009 at 11:01 am
interesting… i am switching between digsby and astra, if astra is able to handle mailaccounts as digsby, i’ll be very happy. and yes, looking forward to the new release
September 30th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Awesome work guys! ANy “listening to” plugin available???
September 30th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Enough already when the heck will you be releasing the MAC version, we don’t all use windows for very good reason so bring on the MAC version!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 30th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Well, this is all well and good but are there any new features that, say, someone that doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook, can use?
I don’t use either, and all these updated “features” are all based on those two services.
Seems a little… targetted. Will there be any other enhancements? Optimizations? Performance boosts? Anything?
September 30th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
HEY! CS! RELEASE THE DAMN 4.1 DATE ALREADY AND GIVE US A NOTICE OF YOU WORKING ON THE SERVER SIDE OF THE NETWORK! I’m tired of my Trillian randomly disconnecting from services as you work out the bugs. A notice would suffice.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:58 am
@More: please have a look at the three previous blog posts…
I haven’t had any server issues lately…. Is your inet connection okay?
@mariox: maybe calm down a bit?
October 1st, 2009 at 10:06 am
add MSN video call please.
even amsn does have it.
October 1st, 2009 at 2:01 pm
The server issues have subsided. The most issues regarded Facebook connectivity. It didn’t happen before CS announced 4.1 would be coming out soon with revamped FB and Twitter. Last night there was a huge AIM server crash though so I apologize since that wasn’t CS’s fault.
Still a lil notice warning the possibility of these services d/c would be nice. At least a blog post.
Additionally, where the hell is the 4.1 release date!
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
@Mariox, I think its funny you threw a fit and it came out like 3 hours later… wanna throw a fit for 4.2 now too, eh?
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
when will 4.1 be out?
October 4th, 2009 at 11:57 am
@ben … are you kidding? It already was out before you even wrote that. Read newer blog entries.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
cannot connect
October 10th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Will the bit.ly and TinyURL features be available for protocols other than Twitter such as using it on WLM/MSN?
October 11th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
This is getting better. The contact list is now showing 3 lines of everyone’s Facebook status which makes it look crowded. This is not needed since hovering your mouse over a contact gives you their status any way. Is there a way to go back to a one liner?
Namaste
October 11th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
@Shenerah … use the simple view for the contact list instead of list view.
We have requested an option for list view though to say “show X lines of status as a maximum” And it isn’t specific to facebook, other mediums do the same thing. Ideally none of the preferneces ever should be medium specific.
October 13th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Ewwww. I hope this crap doesn’t take up any RAM if we’re not using it. I hate twitter/facebook garbage.
October 17th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Why the hell do you FORCE users to have an astra account and make it mandatory to login with it just to get to your contact list which shouldn’t have anything to do with your astra account. Sounds like some big brother action to me! It really sucks when companies pull that kind of junk! Why do I want to send someone @ Cerulean studios my private contacts and other personal things just so I can open the damn program. That is the most retarded change since the old 3.x versions. Any answers??
October 17th, 2009 at 1:15 am
ok- so I’ve read its to synchronize your contact list, and for Cerulean to push other junk on their users they don’t want. So why is this mandatory? Why not optional? So what who cares about contact list sync. Any good client will pull them from the other chat servers anyway. Not to mention when you add a contact like a AIM, or MSN contact.. that stuff is stored on their servers. Why does Cerulean now want all this private info to store on their servers?? More big brother? More annoying anti-x crap? what’s the real reason. Also, why do comments need to be approved before their posted?
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:50 am
is there a how to on setting up facebook
when i click connect the facebook login window is just blank forever
October 30th, 2009 at 12:32 am
[...] worth a try.If you want to see the full list of changes to Twitter and Facebook usage check out the Cerulean Studios’ Blog for more info. The current Trillian 4.0 works ok at windows 7 but the 4.1 released has much [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
How do I create a “floater” window? I’ve seen reference to it around but for the life of me can’t work it out… :/
October 31st, 2009 at 12:53 am
[...] Enlace | Trillian Astra 4.1 [...]
October 31st, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Love it so far!
November 1st, 2009 at 7:45 am
Will it support voice/video chat through MSN?
That’s my only request.
November 1st, 2009 at 10:38 am
So that means that Trillian 4.1 is only an improvement release for Twitter and Facebook stuff? I even don’t use Twitter and Facebook on Trillian is not really a priority for me.
I hoped to see voice and video chat abilities for WLM on 4.1, that is the most important stuff in my opinion and I’m sad to see that this seems not to be a plan for 4.1
November 10th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I love Trillian and had thought that when Astra came out I would go ahead and buy it. But the Twitter part does not work. It will not show the avitars and it does not get any ways near all the tweets. or tweets from all who it should on my list. Guess I will have to be sticking with Seesmic untill they get Astra fixed.
I am hoping that it is going to be fixed anyhow
November 14th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
muy bueno sigan asi… un abrazo. Norberto
November 15th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I found a bug in LOLing. When you LOL a lot the program crashes. Me and my friend have LOLed the whole day and crashed it.
November 16th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
great chat application , i’ve been used this for a month ago,,, next time this version should be more light and speed performance on 256mb memory system,,,
February 8th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I checked the option and i select “connect” but it doesn’t connect to facebook chat. and it takes me to the facebook login screen even though i have it set to “automatically” log me in.