I suppose everybody has one of those weeks where everything is pretty dullsville and nothing exciting is happening. My Monday started off with signs of a cold building up along the horizon. Meh, no problem, I thought—just stock up on the Vitamin C, paracetamol, actifed tablets, tissues, etc. Unfortunately this cold bug (bugger) was a little different, in the sense that it laid wastage to my voice (the last time I experienced this was during my teenage days)—fortunately I’m not a singer. My voice is now 20% of what it used to be, anyway I am having tea with some honey (and yes I know it isn’t good, but the coffee train rolls on) Thank goodness for Windows Live Messenger, a great IM program when it’s working properly (most of the time, must give some kudos to Microsoft) where I don’t have to talk, but type instead.
Speaking of IM programs, I confess I have to eat some humble pie. I have not spoken well of Trillian Astra in the past. What’s Trillian Astra, you ask? It’s a multi-IM client, meaning that if you have contacts using different IM programs, you can let Astra be a supervisor of sorts, incorporating all your WLM, Yahoo, AIM, etc contacts into one basket. I used Trillian 3.1 a long long time ago, and when they announced about going to version 4.0 I was thrilled. However, I didn’t expect Astra 4.0 to be in Alpha for three long years! Man, my patience has a limit, lol. Like waiting for grass to grow. That made me give up on Astra eons ago, and I never thought anymore about it.
Then I was browsing the Net last week and happened to read that Astra had entered into Beta and Trillian was encouraging users to sign up to test it. Like seeing a long-lost girlfriend again, I was enthralled, especially with the way she looked—Trillian must be the Jessica Alba, or Angelina Jolie, or Britney Spears, or (fill in the blank) of the multi-IM world. There’s so much eye-candy that it can be overwhelming at first. I mean, WLM9 doesn’t look half-bad, but when you compare it to this baby—wow! Seduced by the dark side of the Force, I signed up, and they dispatched an email with a download link and token key to me in a blink of an eye. So I download and install Trillian Astra 4.0 and—she’s beautiful. Just look at the screenshots. For a beta product, I’m amazed that most of the features work so well; the sounds are very very cool, and it uses only about 4 MB of system resources on my Pentium 4 computer.
Uh oh, I have to confess again, shucks. I’m not using Astra as a multi-IM client, since 99.9% of my contacts use WLM. I’m not breaking any laws here, am I? It’s my 5th day of using it (they just did an auto upgrade from build 103 to build 104 for me, it was painless) and I’m still enraptured with it. This Pro version times out after 30 days, reverting to the basic version. I don’t know whether I’d shell out $25 to keep the Pro version, I haven’t made up my mind yet. Stay tuned.
