A Series of Tubes

I was recently invited to join the Trillian Astra alpha test. Trillian was my favorite instant messaging program while I was a Windows user, and remained my favorite long after switching to Mac OS. So naturally, I was extremely excited to be invited to the testing cycle of the upcoming 4th major release of Trilly, called Astra.

However, upon launching it, I discovered that it is not really different from the 3rd version of Trillian, just a lot shinier (COUGH COUGH VISTA COUGH COUGH). Also, I remembered that I am almost never on my Windows partition any more, and getting Trillian again is pretty much pointless.

Not only that, I began to feel critical of Windows and Trillian as a whole, all over again. The interface just seems to clunky after the Mac experience. I tried customizing windows to be more like mac (I downloaded ObjectDock to obtain a dock for windows, and a Quicksilver ripoff duplicate -ish program to get that interface as well), but in the end the best I can get is a sad, deformed version of OS X. And trillian wasn’t the beautiful program I remembered, either.

The interface seemed so bland and complicated compared to Adium, which I used to hate with a passion. I remembered having a ton of fun with it, but using it now it just seems slow and packed with features I’m never going to use.

So basically, I’m giving away my Astra account to someone who will make better use of it, Matt. He’s a real Windows guy, and more power to him for that. We’ve had plenty of intellectual debates about the rival operating systems (“omg m$ windows sux” “no fag windows ftw, mac sux ass” “bill gates? more liek dollar bill gay-ts” and so on), but we’re still friends, so I’ll trust him with my Astra account. I bet it looks better on Vista anyway.