Trillian Astra

So, a few weeks ago Trillian Astra became pretty much open beta, automatically giving approval to everyone who signed up for a beta invite. I’ve been playing with it, and I’m rather happy with it, considering buying it once it’s released.

Has anyone else been following the progress of Astra? Thoughts?
[edit]Here’s a link if anyone is interested in trying it out.[/edit]

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been a Trillian user since v1, but I’ve been missing social media integration with v3, which feels long in the tooth.

Hopefully v4 will have a better footprint, Trillian’s always been a hog.

I used to worry about that, but with the advent of 64-bit OSes, and 6GB of RAM being dirt cheap, I’m finally not worrying too much about large RAM footprints. Well, not unless there is a better/equal app with a better footprint, and Trillian is not easily swapped out like azureus was for utorrent.

You clearly don’t do 90% of your work on a Pentium M with 1.5GB of RAM.

Just because you have assloads of RAM doesn’t mean you should be forgiving about programs with godawful memory leaks and horribly optimized code.

How fast would our computers run if programmers weren’t taking our insane system resources for granted?

I have been searching for a replacement for Google’s Hello, for sharing photos with my parents and friends while chatting - sharing = putting photo in chat window, photo being as large as we like, and photo being there in the window for both of us while we discuss it.

Will Astra allow this?

Installing now. Egads, I very nearly let the Weather Channel Desktop and the Ask toolbar in (thinking the check box on the previous page was a license acceptance and that there was actually some little Trillian weather widget).

From: http://fav.or.it/post/1328143/trillian-astras-still-alive-beta-available

…When you install though, don’t just cruise through the process on auto-pilot or you’ll wind up with the Weather Channel toolbar and the Ask.com toolbar. Two other problems stuck out: the news ticker that appears at the top of the chat window can’t be removed or even configured to run headlines that are useful to you, and the search function in the Options menu doesn’t work. This makes it difficult to navigate through the overhaul, since many features have changed in the update.

Can’t say I’m overjoyed with the other required ad stuff mentioned there, but I suppose you get what you pay for.

Edit: Been playing with it for a few minutes - very slick and nice features!

The search function does work, it’s just somewhat limited in scope, and to change the RSS feeds displayed to you, go to Preferences -> Chat -> Instant Lookup, which has a list of RSS feeds that it draws from for that ticker, as well as allowing you to turn off the word highlighting in chat.