At long last, Cerulean Studios has finally sent me an invite to their Trillian Astra ALPHA 2, I have been long-awaiting this next version of the popular multi-messaging client. Apart from a cracked copy i tried for a total of 5 minutes (too buggy!) i have been waiting patiently for like 3 years to get a try at playing with Trillian Astra. Now Cerulean has put up a sneak preview and Sign-up site that taunts some of its slick new features we can expect in the successor to Trillian 3.1. Here's a quick review of what's you can expect when its finally done:

Performance:
Astra improves on start-up time, redrawing time (i.e. how quickly skinned elements appear and change), and memory usage. Memory leaks have also been plugged and Cerulean is building some lightweight skins with efficient memory usage in mind. This is already very obvious in this Alpha build.

Interoperability:
Brand new in Astra is support for MySpace IM and full support for Google Talk component (distinct from the Jabber plugin). Also coming is improved file transfer compatibility (haven't had a chance to test this yet!), Under the hood, they've created an "IMCore" library that aims to make IM plugins stabler and easier to develop.


Social software:
Astra comes with some features for managing all of your different accounts and making it easier for people to get ahold of you. You can now store you contacts online, allowing you to log in on to another computer (assuming that it has a copy of Astra) and have all of your accounts and contacts load automatically. For better or for worse, they're also adding widgets. So far i've tried twitter, my mood and the clock...i say wait with this stuff until at LEAST the beta comes out! It's still far from good or usefull

Web services:
Cerulean Studios is making a big web push with Astra. Users' status for all of their accounts will be displayed on the web (optionally, obviously), but the biggest news is that Astra users will be able to login with any web browser and send and receive IMs on any of their accounts. The aforementioned widgets will also be web-enabled.

Message window:
They've totally revamped the message window. It now features drag-and-drop (or copy-and-paste) image sharing, pen input for tablet PC folks or just people who like to draw with the mouse, and RSS-feed-reading "knowledge bar." There's also a "buzz" feature ported from other clients which they describe as "an incredibly annoying way to quickly get [a contact's] attention." They apologize for adding the latter feature, however, and presumably it can be disabled. Finally, Astra has a "saved font styles" feature that lets you set up predefined styles e.g. "important" or "code."

Contact list:
The contact list, which I consider the most important part of any IM client, is getting a new "tile view" that shows buddy icons and names not unlike, say, the Windows desktop, a Searchbox for finding a particular contact among many, drag-and-drop avatar changing, and easy display name changing. A little too busy at times especially if you have lots of buddies. however spending ten to fifteen minutes cleaning and organizing your list makes it much more manageable

Skins

All i can say is nice job..good looking default skin with many different "color themes". It can get a little busy but i guess i just have to get used to it but it is finally including the ability to change skins without restarting Trillian as well as Alpha Transparency.

That's lots of changes, and once again, makes it highly competitve with other multi-protocol messaging services!

When I first heard about Astra and saw the first few screenshots I knew it would be a nice upgrade and this new Alpha 2 aptly demonstrates that there's a ton of new stuff coming for loyal Trillian users.

Sign-up for the sexy IM-client Alpha testing now! go to http://www.trillianastra.com/