Trillian Astra is an instant messaging service that has a twist: it lets you combine all your friends from several messengers on a single interface, so only one application will be opened when you want to talk to everyone on your lists.
This software imports all the contacts of your selected instant messaging platforms (Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Skype), but it can also directly access social networks (Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn).
In addition, Trillian has borrowed most of the important features from other messengers that you like so much, and added new ones.
You can open a new window and chat, or send a quick message to a friend who has just signed in.
Friends can be sorted in the list in various ways (e.g. alphabetically, by conversation history size), but also "resized" on Trillian's interface (e.g. large, medium, small).
When you talk to a friend, you can insert a screen capture (by clicking and dragging the mouse), flag text as important (i.e. yellow text with red highlights), or change font to code style (which is especially useful if you're trying to explain a programming language to someone).
There are tons of emoticons you can play with (smiley faces, objects and symbols), and some of them are compatible with both Yahoo and MSN Messenger.
The chat history is better organized than in typical instant messengers, because here you can actually select a date from the calendar to view a conversation, as well as view any images exchanged between you and your friends.
Trillian supports several languages and uses minimal memory resources (a true improvement, when you think about the messengers you typically use).
We haven't found anything wrong with this instant messaging tool, and we highly recommend you test it for yourself. It's free, and it has a bit of everything!
What's New in This Release:
Fixed:
· [Alerts] Send out initiated destroy to only the alerts seen, not to all alerts if they are bulked up and close is clicked
· [Contact List] Increase autohide delay
· [Crash] Crash when receiving particular yfrog urls
· [Crash] Potential crash in Facebook web login with older versions of IE
· [File Transfers] Use medium display name when rendering medium
· [File Transfers] Zip files are the wrong direction for OSX
· [History] History overview (browse) doesn't have an IRC icon
· [History] Images not downloaded (and not linked) in the history (if it came from the iphone)
· [History] Image preview in history may clip off the title bar
· [History] Truncate the 'delete message' messagebox with larger messages
· [Jumplist] Fix the glitch with loading multiple copies destroying the jump list
· [Jumplist] Remove website link
· [Login] Bad password or switch user will focus another copy of Trillian if its up
· [Login] Focus the password field
· [Mail] support
· [Mail] Archive should also mark a...
Users are advised to pay attention while installing this ad-supported application:
· Offers to download or install software or components (Ask Toolbar, Xobni) that the program does not require to fully function
· Attempts to change the default search engine for web browsers installed on the system
· Displays ad banners or other types of advertising material during its runtime