Trillian Pro 2.012

The trouble with instant-messaging (IM) programs is that they simply don't play well with one another. That's why Cerulean Studios' Trillian Pro 2.012 is a godsend: for a small fee, this program collects all the major IM programs under one easy-to-use interface. While Cerulean Studios offers a stripped-down, free version (you can download Trillian 0.74 here), the paid version, Trillian Pro 2.012, gives you greater customisation options and nifty business-related plug-ins that are well worth the $25 (~£14) cost.

Using PayPal, we bought Trillian Pro 2.012 at Cerulean Studios' site, and within 30 seconds, the company sent us a download address and login information. Once set up, the Trillian Pro 2.012 client lists all of your online contacts alphabetically in a single console, with a coloured dot next to their names indicating which service they belong to: orange for AIM, green for ICQ, grey for IRC, blue for MSN and red for Yahoo. If you get a new contact who uses a service you don't currently subscribe to, it's simple to set up a new account: click the Connection Manager at the bottom of the Trillian Pro 2.012 console, then the New button to subscribe to a new service. The estimated time for setting up a new service account is less than five minutes. No Web search or download is necessary, and there's no new program to learn. Nor will you need to remember which service a particular contact belongs to -- another big plus. In the past, Trillian has experienced outages when Yahoo or AIM have blocked its service. However, these outages were short-lived, and a simple upgrade to the latest version of Trillian Pro 2.012 often resolved the matter. Cerulean Studios appears to have a better working relationship with AIM and Yahoo IM today. Trillian Pro 2.012's Connection Manager manages chat preferences, filters and special features for each service you subscribe to, such as AIM's DirectIM and Yahoo IM's Webcam features, both of which work within Trillian Pro. When you double-click a contact to start a new chat in Trillian Pro, you'll get a window containing the dimmed contents of your last chat -- handy when you have multiple conversations going at once. Trillian's main console also alerts you whenever email arrives at the various Web mail services associated with your chat services, such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. To retrieve the message, simply click your email address, and you're whisked off to the appropriate page, logged in, and delivered to your inbox. This is a great convenience. The Pro version of Trillian supports different skins, for those who want to personalise the look and feel. Business users can choose from a wide range of plug-ins that integrate current news, weather, stock quotes, computer performance stats and world time into the main Trillian Pro 2.012 console. Although these additions aren't as useful as the program's main features, they're still nice. Fortunately, there's no shortage of help for Trillian Pro 2.012. Paid members get updates, priority trouble-ticket-based email help and access to enough online FAQs and documentation to severely eat into chatting time.