Keith Devens .com

I've been using Miranda and am pretty happy with it. What you mean by message-based user interface?

Are you seeing anything different from this?

Just curious, but what do you find dated about Trillian? I've not bothered to look at anything else, as it does what I require.

I actually didn't try Miranda for that long, since the entire program seemed to be built around the message, rather than the chat. I'll actually give it another try since beyond that I'm stuck with going back to AIM+DeadAIM. If I try Miranda again soon I'll post here some examples of what I mean by message vs. chat.

Re: Trillian (0.74) being dated... it doesn't properly support some formatting, but most importantly it doesn't support Unicode, so sometimes people will send messages and all I get is "You received a Unicode message, but Trillian can't display it" (though that's not the actual message). Otherwise, Trillian is pretty decent, though I'd like it if it supported tabbed IM windows. And, I didn't say dated, but rather showing its age, as in things that are flaky but had never been fixed. For a while it kept automatically putting an away message up that I had used once but never saved. It did this for weeks no matter what I did to stop it

Ok, well first time I tried Miranda it crashed on me when I tried to close the unnecessary "Yep, I'm here" message that comes up. I didn't try to do that the next time and it worked. I think the main thing that gave me the "message-based" impression of the program is that the history log shows individual messages instead of entire conversations.

Things I don't like about Miranda:

• There seems to be no formatting in IMs
• The logs aren't in a plain text format, but are all stored in one big .dat file.
• I can't specify where the logs are stored.

Otherwise, it seems to work ok. There's no tabbed IM windows, but for that as well as possibly for everything I listed above there may be plugins, and Miranda has a lot of them. I'll have to take a further look at the program.

By the way, the coolest feature of AYTTM by far is that if you get an IM from someone not on your buddy list, it automatically adds them to an "Unknown" category.

And the crappiest feature of GAIM was that its font support was abysmal. The font it used by default was too small, and if I upped the size it became too big. My friend on a Mac said that when I made the font "bigger", on his end it actually was smaller than the default font. Plus, trying to change the default font for GTK did nothing.

<i>There seems to be no formatting in IMs</i>

What do you mean by that?

<i>The logs aren't in a plain text format, but are all stored in one big .dat file.</i>

I conside that a plus

<i>I can't specify where the logs are stored.</i>

Edit mirandaboot.ini to change that . Other than that, miranda is very customizable, if you want a different messaging interface you can just download a new plugin.

I'm assuming that you're not a mac person... but just in case you are, Fire is a great app that lets you use multiple accounts all in one place. [http://fire.sourceforge.net/]

FWIW, you can use a windows jabber client and hit any of the public servers which have the transports you want. Even if the server you register on (say jabber.org) does not have transports, you can use those on other public servers (and still use your jabber.org jid).

<shameless-plug>My Jabber client is Exodus.</shameless-plug>

pgm.

Dude, just get a pirated copy from Kazaa or eMule already and just try Trillian. It's good. Get off your high horse about not being able to try before you buy. If you really like it, pay for it and legalize your copy. God will forgive.

The newest free version of trillian is due soon, and Pro is awesome. I too wanted a trial before I paying for trillian but I made the plunge and I'm a very happy customer.

How do you know that a new free version is coming out?

Anyway, I'm glad to know Pro is good. Maybe I will buy it then if I don't go the Jabber route. I'd heard bad things about Pro... you wouldn't consider it bloated? Oh, lastly... I wish Pro had tabbed IM windows...

One of the developers mentioned it on the private subscribers forum, you have to be a paid up pro member to get access.

Pro can do tabbed windows actually, it's a setting that turns any container into a tabbed container. Everyone's definition of bloat is different. It can be a lil heavy as compared to a normal messaging client but the features out weigh the negatives for me. Everyone will be different though. If you like really slimmed down software this probably isn't the right package, but if you want lots and lots of customization, it is.

Trillian has a free 3.0 version.. have you tried that?

I've actually been a registered user of Trillian for a while (this post is old). I heard enough endorsements of Trillian to get over the fear of no trial version. Plus, I'd been using their free version for so long that I would have wanted to donate money anyway even if I wasn't buying their pro version, so I bought the pro version and didn't worry about it.

I haven't figured out yet whether 3.0 basic is an upgrade to 2.0 pro or not, so I haven't tried it. In any case, I'm completely satisfied with Trillian 2.0, so it doesn't really matter to me either way.