One For All (Trillian)

Member Name: thanatoszane

Product:	Trillian
Date:	11/08/02 (2105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: free, small, 5-networks

Disadvantages: not the same as using all of them, sometimes doesn't connect, not all the features

Anyone who lives online even half as much as I do will probably have a need for several Instant Messaging (IM from now on) programs. It starts innocently enough... your friend uses Yahoo Messenger so you download that, then you meet some online friends who use Microsofts? MSN Messenger and you install that... your colleagues use ICQ so that goes on too, then you find a friendly online community such as OpCom (see my profile if you don?t know about The Opinionated Community) and start using IRC.

The final straw comes when someone asks you to put AOL Instant Messenger on as well. That is NOT touching my hard drive!

Each IM program has it?s own special features - ICQ Plus for example is very good looking once skinned, MSN has some nice features such as the shared whiteboard, and Yahoo has ?IMVironments? - basically pretty message windows you can send to people, but basically, the main purpose of most IM programs is just to chat to people.

Running five IM programs at any time can be annoying.

Each one takes up hard disk space (Not a huge factor these days, but those extra few MB can be annoying if space is tight, and a large windows\system directory can cause problems anyway.) and takes time to load if you have it in your startup folder. they also take up space in your systray and in your system memory.

My computer is quite a beast, with 512Mb RAM, but even so, the more programs you have running, the greater the chance that something will crash.

From a more ?userish? point of view, having to fiddle around with the five difference user interfaces, and having five programs running on the screen at any one time can be a pain. Even if you know what you?re doing, simple things like the enter key being a line break in one program and ?send message? in another can get irritating, and embarrassing, if you?re switching between program and get annoying at times.

Trillian negates some of these problems.

I
t?s 5 chat & IM clients in one. One program, one user interface allows you to connect to five networks. You still need accounts and user IDs on all of them, but this is mostly due to the fact that AOL doesn't allow people to chat to people on other networks, neither do some of the other programs.

Trillian is skin-able, using some strange XML based coding. None of the skins are that good looking, but with a bit knowledge and time, you can completely remold the user interface.

If you have Windows ME or XP, it has some nice features such as transparency. Fun, but hardly functional.

You can have multiple accounts on each network with Trillian, but the current version doesn?t have very good profile support, so the contact lists end up merging.

Trillian has it?s own set of emoticons and sounds, which you can change if you like. It?s sometimes confusing though if you?re using Trillian and your friend has, say MSN - the emoticons come out differently, and some things, such as the IRC standard emote ? /me ?, which Trillian interprets correctly, aren?t translated by the other clients.

Trillian only has the basic features of each client. You can set away messages and set your states to invisible, away, brb, etc. You can appear invisible to certain users, always visible to others.. and it supports the MSN feature that tells you when the person you are talking to is typing a message.

It can handle file transfers, although this sometimes seems a bit finicky.

It supports connections through proxies and firewalls, although I have found this flaky at times - ICQ can auto-detect open ports for connection with much greater reliability, and I have found MSN and Y!M both thinking they?re connected using Trillian when actually they?re not. This gets annoying - you send someone a message, wait ages for a reply, not knowing that they didn?t actually get it.

There are some decent logging features - you can
time stamp logs and choose what you want to save, be it all status windows, chats, or just message windows.

The security in it is basic - you can select passwords to tie to profiles, and you can choose wether or not to show your IP address. There?s also 128bit encryption for secure IM sessions to other Trillian users.

Trillian is free, and, even better, ad-free. They do ask you to donate if you can afford it - $5 will ensure that you always get free, ad-free copies and give you access to a secure, donators only area of their site.

The mIRC options on it are very basic - you can add mIRC users to your contact list, but you can?t set alerts for when mIRC users come online the way you can for users of ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc.

The right-click menus in Trillian do allow you to perform most mIRC related actions - private message, op, kick, ban, etc. I haven?t found an ice-breaker option though :-(

Trillian is pretty stable, and some of the skins are cute. It?s nice to be able to globally connect / disconnect to all your programs in one go, and has reduced the screen clutter I used to suffer.

It does have it?s own foibles and problems though, and sometimes I find myself going back to ICQ or mIRC. I much prefer it to MSN and Y!M though!

It might not be for you if you only use a couple of the programs day to day, or have a strong attachment to one program, but it is worth a shot. You don?t have to uninstall your other programs to use it, and they can run alongside each other, just you can?t be logged into a network on both programs at once.

Try it - It?s free, it?s a small download, what have you got to loose?

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