Ceruleanstudios keeps releasing new alpha builds of Trillian Astra to their testers every Friday. Besides numerous bugfixes, several new features have been added over the last weeks. Trillian-Messenger.net presents a summary of new features and a special technology preview.

Trillian Mini

Trillian Mini is a online status indicator - Trillian style of course. It combines the status display of all messenger services that a user has. In addition, it displays small versions of the widgets that a user activated, e.g. the song currently playing, local time, or weather information. Trillian Mini can be easily added to webpages, blogs and forums. It is based on Adobe Flash.   

New Installer

The eight year old installer was redesigned with build 34 of Trillian Astra. It still provides the same features, but it looks a lot nicer now.

"OS Layer" technology 

 Ceruleanstudios released a video showing a technology that they call "OS Layer". It allows to use the web-based Trillian version outside of the regular browser window. The flash application behaves like a program that is installed on the local machine. It shows up in the system tray and new windows are accessible via the task bar. The goal is to make the web based Trillian support 99% of all common Trillian features, which would be an incredible achievement for a web-based application. This new technology has been entirely developed by Ceruleanstudios, however it is not available yet and little technical details are known. Ceruleanstudios states that it is not based on the Adobe Apollo technology and that it does not use Java. It is currentl only tested on Windows but it should work on Linux and Mac OS X as well. If this really works cross-platform without any software installation, it will be one the most advanced new features of Trillian Astra. The Video with the technology preview is available on YouTube.