5 in 1 chat (Trillian)

Member Name: Stalin

Product:	Trillian
Date:	14/10/01 (924 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Network integration that works, unified and skinable interface, good IRC client

Disadvantages: Lacks some advanced features, slightly buggy, could be too much for many people

There are many ways of chatting in real time over the 'net. The most popular method is using an instant messenger (such as ICQ). The less well-known but much older option is IRC (internet relay chat). But what are you to do if you have friends using different IM networks and also want to chat on IRC? Running several clients at once is not only a drain on system resources but is also difficult to manage.

Here's where Trillian comes in. It is a single program that integrates the four big IM networks (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and MSN) and IRC into one interface. I was more than a little sceptical about this, having previously tried Jabber (which does a similar thing) and having experienced numerous problems with the network operators trying to block Jabber's connections to their networks. AOL is particularly notorious for not allowing third-party clients to operate. Happily, I experienced none of these problems with Trillian. How it avoids them I don't know, I just hope that it continues to do so.

Having five different mediums to manage, Trillian does an admirable job of making them feel seamless, especially IRC which is rather different to the others. For instance, all your IM contacts are combined into a single list. That is easy enough, and to be expected. What I didn't expect was that this list can also include IRC contacts. The idea of an IRC contact list has not existed before, and is something that Trillian has added itself, and is pretty handy. Another feature that promotes the single feel are the status settings. Setting your status to 'away' for example sets your status as such on all the IM networks AND IRC.

This integration comes with a price, however. The more advanced features of the various IM networks are unavailable in Trillian, such as ICQ's SMS paging and MSN's Net2Phone. I never used these features anyway, although I know that some people do. The IRC client is actually pretty well featured, altho
ugh mIRC junkies will find its lack of configuration options limiting. It does have some features that mIRC does not, such as visual representation of many things that would normally be typed at the command line. If, for instance, you operate a channel yourself, you can set all its options (such as topic, password etc) in a nice dialogue box.

The other main attraction of Trillian is that it is skinable. The default skin is very attractive (although rather clunky) and there are many more to download from the site. You are sure to get it looking how you want (even if you want it ?skinless?, check out the ?Windows Standard? skin).

Trillian is still in beta, and as such there are still a number of problems. It crashes occasionally, although normally only when closing so it isn?t too much of an issue. It also has a tendency to forget some of your IRC settings, particularly the last server you connected to. This is especially annoying if you always connect to the same server. Other than that, though, there really aren?t that many niggles to be found, which is pretty impressive.

I have been using Trillian for over a month now, and it has simplified my communications no end. If you are like me and need to work on more than one of the supported networks at once, you should definitely give it a try. If, however, you only use one then will be missing out on a lot of Trillian?s best features, so you might be better off sticking with the official client unless you really hate how it looks. One thing is for sure, though. It has earned itself a permanent place in my system tray, and not many apps have gained that honour!

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