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I have been using Trillian for a VERY long time – something in the order of 8+ years.
Its has its limitations and problems, for example, it hasn’t supported audio and video chats (not that I use these all that often) and for some reason its always had issues when trying to send or receive files.
I have also had the honor of being an Alpha Tester of the yet-to-be-released Trillian Astra (which does support audio, video etc. as well as a grand list of other features – most of which I don’t use)
About a week ago, my PC had a ‘hiccup’ (well, someone accidentally kicked over the external SATA drive attached to the PC and pulled out the cable) which required a restart. On returning from the restart, Trillian opened with no contacts in the list, and none of my settings.
Ordinarily, this isn’t much of an issue. Trillian uses INI files for its configuration rather than add too many entries into the windows registry, and simply overwriting the INI files with backed-up versions usually resolves any problems.
I was fortunate enough to have made a backup of the entire Trillian data and program folders just the day before, so I restored these to their original locations. But alas, still nothing in the contacts list, and my account configuration was marked as ‘inactive’. No matter how much fiddling about I did, I just couldn’t get it working again – at one stage I managed to get all my contacts back up, but every one of them was marked as ‘Orphaned’ (meaning it wasn’t attached to an account.
So – after all these years of loyalty, I have decided I am now finished with it. The new Trillian Astra has been in Alpha Testing phase for over 2 years now, and shows no sign of even going Beta any time soon.
After a little looking about, I have decided to give Pidgin a try.
Pidgin is a much the same as Trillian – a multi-flavour IM client. Its also Open Source, which is an extra bonus point for it too.
I have been playing around with it now for a few hours, and I have found a few good and bad points about it so far:
First thing to go was the sounds – Not so much a criticism, but with the amount of people I have in my contacts list, the constant coming-and-going led to a continual soundtrack
The interface is very…Bland – I’m sure its just that I’m used to Trillian’s interface, but Pidgin’s interface is very lacklustre with no prettyness at all – I’m sure its something I’ll get used to.
It doesn’t have System Tray pop-up notifications – This may be an option somewhere I’m missing, but I would like the little pop-ups when people come online the same as Windows Live Messenger does.
The chat window favicons are the buddy icons of the contact – I LOVE this feature, it helps to identify who you’re chatting to in the task bar without having to hover, or open the chat window
Anyways – I’m sure there’s a lot more for me to learn about the new member of my application family, and I shall endeavour to keep you all posted.
For now, I have a big task ahead of me – I have to now go through all of the old Trillian logs, and update all of my contacts names to be what I had them set to in Trillian – this is going to be an epic task…
<sigh>