Super Chatting

We have covered universal instant messengers in the past. These are for people who use multiple instant messengers (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, etc), and would like one tool that provides a common interface to all. Trillian is one such messenger. Developed by Cerulean Studios (a Connecticut-based company, founded in May 1998) this messenger was free for a long time in development. It now has two versions: v0.74 (free) and Trillian Pro 1.0 (premium paid version). You can download the free version, which is just 2.4 MB, from

www.trillian.cc.

The beauty of this baby is that it does not require you to register with yet another network to use the client (other clients like Jabber want you to have a Jabber account, too). Installation is straightforward. It places an icon on your desktop to launch it and makes an entry in the Start Menu. It asks you to create a profile, which is meant to allow multiple users to use the same installation of Trillian. Their settings, preferences and messages are stored separately. Once you create your profile and enter some basic information about yourself (like age, location, etc), you are asked to configure your various chat accounts. Trillian supports Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and IRC chat. You need to enter the login ids (UIN in case of ICQ) and passwords.

Check the box for ‘Connect on Trillan startup’ to allow Trillian to connect to all the media during startup. These settings can always be changed later by accessing the ‘Connection Manager’. For Yahoo, MSN and AIM, it imports your contact list from the servers and adds it into the interface. For ICQ, you can import from the ICQ contact list file on your local machine (users using ICQ would know that all the contacts’ details are stored in a database file in the ICQ directory). The Trillian main window lists all your contacts. You can choose to arrange them according to the chat medium or create your own groups (like Office, Home, Friends) and drag contacts across various media to drop them into the new groups.

A visual treat



Customizability is another major feature. You can play around with virtually all of the interface settings. Trillian supports an advanced XML-based skinning language, which allows you to change any aspect of Trillian you wish. This includes, but is not limited to, the window background, size, layout, icons, emoticons, etc. It supports JPG, GIF and BMPs file formats for skinning. Double clicking on a contact brings up the chat window that is customizable in terms of the fonts and colors used. It supports emoticons and emotisounds, too. Interestingly, you are not restricted to the preset emoticons in the client. Using a different skin can change images for the emoticons. There are a host of skins on the Trillian website for you to experiment with. Users using Win 2000 or XP can take advantage of alpha transparency to make the main window and the chat windows transparent. 

Messages and status



Another interesting feature of Trillian is that it keeps all your chat logs (sorted according to nicks or e-mail ids). These are convenient time-stamped text files that can be invoked any time by clicking on the ‘History’ option in a chat window. URLs typed during a chat session are ‘grabbed’ and stored for quick reference later. 

Traditional chat clients come with preset status messages (like Away and Busy). Trillian allows you to write your own status messages. Any one messaging you would be auto-responded with the custom status message. These messages can be linked to standard status messages on various chat media, too. 

More



Trillian allows you to send files to your contacts by right clicking on a file in Windows Explorer (aka ICQ Explorer integration). So, you can click on a picture and directly send it to a contact on your chat list. To make your chat sessions secure, Trillian uses 128-bit Blowfish encryption with a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. Currently this is available for ICQ and AIM only. 

Click on the globe (at the bottom left corner with the default skin) to access ‘Preferences’. Preferences control the complete behavior of the messenger, including visual display and effects, loading preferences, connection settings and file transfer. The available settings are too many to go into detail here. Take your time to explore them and set them according to your liking.

Trillian Pro



This is the paid version of Trillian (costs $25). Apart from all the above features, Trillian Pro has lots of additional conveniences. It extends its functionalities by means of plugins. Currently nine plugins are available for the client that can be installed and configured. These are: POP3, Winamp 2.x, News, Weather, Stocks, IM Forwarding, MiniBrowser, Clipboard and My Stuff.

The POP3 plugin allows you to configure any POP3 e-mail account to be checked. This acts like a mail popper except that it does not download any headers or messages. It just keeps checking and informing you about any new mail. Clicking on the link would then invoke your regular e-mail client (Outlook Express, Eudora, etc). Winamp 2.x plugin is my favorite; it reclaims my desktop and Taskbar space because I need not have the Winamp window open anywhere. I just need to run Winamp and minimize it (so that it disappears from the taskbar too. Check Winamp preferences for doing this). All playback controls are available in the Trillian main window itself. It even displays the playlist and prompts via a system tray pop-up about the title of songs at song change! 

News plugin accesses some preconfigured news servers on the Internet and downloads/updates news feeds. You can also add your custom news feeds. Also, when a feed is refreshed (automatically), the system tray pop ups and shows the new news items (which also are hyper linked to its origin web page). Weather and stock plugins do what the names suggest–weather info and stocks status checking. 

IM forwarding is a whole new world of convenience. This forwards your instant messages to your e-mail account or to your mobile phone (the latter being a big boon). For the latter, if you are in the US, you can use your listed cellphone operator. For anywhere else in the world, you can use ICQ’s SMS service. Just enter your mobile phone number and enable IM forwarding. Never miss those important messages from your girlfriend!

Clipboard plugin allows viewing or pasting the last ten entries on your Windows clipboard into a chat window. Type ‘/clip view’ during any conversation to view them, select one and click ‘Send’. My Stuff is a URL Grabber plugin that does the same function as the URL Grabber in Trillian v0.74 (URL Grabber is missing in Trillian 1.0 version).

Ashish Sharma