Saturday, January 26, 2008

Cerulean Studios Trillian Astra Review and Walk Though : Day One

I have been wonting to do a review on Astra for a while now, but never had a real chance, until today! For those who never heard of Trillian or Astra, Your missing out. Trillian is a multi-protocol program that allows you to chat, IM, voice, and video conference with your friends, buddies and co-workers. Multi-Protocol, meaning that this one program can handle many of the standard Instant messaging services out there already. So instead of having three programs running, three contact list,  and three or more windows running and cluttering your desktop; Like you would have if you installed AOL IM, Yahoo, IM, and MSN IM. This one program handles them all. This originally was useful to me when I was a admin to a large gaming network and community. Being signed on to all the protocols allowed any one to contact me regardless of instant messaging program they used.

Trillian is not the only program that does this, there are several other multi-Protocol programs out there, for example Gaim. Gaim is another widely popular open source multi-platform program that allows you to use several protocols at once. Gaim is no match to the power of Astra in my opinion.

Astra is the name of the next generation Trillian. Astra Currently is in its alpha stages and is invite only. Luckily I been invited. It was a long and funny story how I got my invite.  I have been fallowing Astra from its early stages, around build 7 or so. I have signed up on the invite list, like four times, each with a different e-mail, hoping that it would increase my chances of getting an invite. Around build 30 I could not wait any more, The Screen shots of what they were showing was amazing, Totally mind blowing. I had to get my hands on a copy. Down the road Cerulean Studios, open the invite list to those who bought the pro version of Trillian 3. Therefore to better increase my chance to test Astra I went and bought Trillian 3. Few days after, I got my invite. But to my surprise I got my invite on a different e-mail then I used when I bought Trillian. Therefor I bought Trillian for nothing. The moral of the story is to be patient.

My plane it to break down this post into 3 day review and walk though of the latest Build of Trillian Astra. Day one will be on installation, setup and configuration. Day two I finish up, configuration and show you around Trillian and some of its neat features. Day Three I will show widgets and Trillian online.

 

This is a fresh install of the latest build of Trillian Astra. Cerulean Studios releases a new build almost ever week. But this does not mean you have to go though the installation once a week. Trillian has an automatic update feature that allows updates to be pushed out, to patch it's clients seamlessly.

imageYour basic licence agreement. Who reads these things anyway, I Do!

 

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After the installation, it brings you to the login screen.  This acts very much like how windows handles multiple users. This allows several people to use the same compute and Windows account, but each user can set a master password, to login into all of his or he IM accounts, protocols and settings.

 

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Username and password to connect to the Astra network. Notice I ticked remember account password and automatically sign in. This is because I'm the only one using my laptop.

 

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This is screens shows the status of you login. It loads up preferences, contact lists, logs, plugins, and logs you into the Astra Network. The white square above, normally will show your buddy icon. But because this is my first time login in, it has not retrieved my buddy icon and data from Astra network.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Been trying to get an invite for over a year now. Kinda think it's hopeless