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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/s> duplicate<\/s> -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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n