As people may or may not know. I use Trillian as my instant messenger client. I even payed for the Pro version. The developers have been very, very quiet the last 6 months but now they are offering “tit-bits” on their blog for the faithful.
For people that have never heard of Trillian, it is an IM client that works across all networks. I don’t have all the separate programs running like MSN, Yahoo or ICQ (it also covers Jabba and AOL). I just have one that accesses these networks. So what I do have is an identity for each network and Trillian pulls all these together into one client. The good thing about this is that I do not have to run these separate applications and I am not locked into one network or the other. It has a small footprint and it works well. There are also plug-ins that you can get as well. There is a free version if you want to check it out.
The latest version is version three. For ages now the development team have been very quiet about any further development. The rumblings in the Trillian community have been everything ranging from they are not developing Trillian and they have abandoned the users. To whatever they are working on is going to be so good that we will be blown away. I am not sure what the developers have been doing or what their intentions are. I however do not think that they have abandoned their users. That said one criticism of Cerulean Studios is the fact that they offer very little to reassure the user base that they are working hard in development. They offer a blog entry every couple of months.
The latest is a screen shot of the new version of Trillian. But it is a very lame log in window screen shot. I would have loved to have seen the main screen of Trillian rather than the log in screen! I think this is a bit of a cop out and I think that they could have given users a bit more of a preview.
That said it looks like we might see a new version of Trillian before the end of the year. I know that is a wide projection but Trillian have refused to say when the new version will be out… period. I guess given other companies’ (“Vista”) ability to keep to promised time-lines, you can not disappoint people if you don’t give one!
But hey Trillian dudes give us a bit more than a log in screen!
The other minor thing that they have announced is a name change for version four. That being “Trillian Astra”. Sounds like an Aussie car to me… very funny. That announcement is accompanied by another lame web page… [update: this page now relates to Trillian Astra with previews and Beta testers login – changed from the original time this was posted] …please. I really hope we get more than this “…in the coming weeks”.
Update: Removed dead links and reviewed relevance of links. The reason being is the same links have been used for newer content related to Astra.
Rooster's Rail 
May 11, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Don’t worry, David – we’ll be posting more screenshots, I promise. Had to start somewhere though, and the login screen seemed appropriate for that purpose.
November 18, 2006 at 1:12 am
Why does http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ do not work?!
Can the Trillian 4 “Beta” can be downloaded anywhere?!
November 18, 2006 at 1:25 am
That link you have quoted is the link to the Trillian Homepage – from there you can download the latest version which is three.
Trillian 4 is in beta but it is a closed beta. The guys at Cerulean Studios don’t say much. Every now and then I hear some stuff about 4 but it is rare. I have not hard anything for months. But it is coming.
So the answer to your question is no Trillian 4 beta is not available for public download.
July 16, 2008 at 2:08 am
I’ve Trillian Pro (paid), tried to contact cerulean to get the Astra version and receive no answer… Kind of arrogant, they should at least release a BETA version with limited downloads, something like it, or send a download key to Trillian users to test it. I’ve seen people who never used Trillian receiving ‘Astra’ and we old users can’t! Nobody say or offer anything. Hope Miranda, Gaim, etc release their new features/skins; I’ll no longer pay for Trillian.