Switch to Pidgin

http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/

Now you can share all your explosive   bondage soup recipes over the wire without fear of being intercepted.

4 years ago

I’ve been using Trillian religiously over the last 5 years. Time for a deconversion.

As of today, Trillian can’t send or received files over Yahoo Messenger; doesn’t properly handle hyperlinks in AIM messages; and got very slow on my Pentium M @ 1.86GHz w/ 1.5Gb RAM: startup and shutdown take (excluding network connection time) over half a minute (during which the OS pretty much freezes), creating or closing a tab takes several seconds and you can see Trillian crawl, and receiving an IM from a user not having a conversation window already open also freezes the system for a few seconds.

• open source, with wiki and forums
• extremely fast: 1-second shutdown, 2-second startup, instant tab operations
• can send files to Yahoo Messenger clients, but can’t apparently receive files
• integrated spell checking
• correctly handles links in AIM messages
• handy “reset formatting” button for those times when you paste something from the other person and pick up their annoying font/color
• works perfectly through SOCKS5 proxies, including file transfers over YM
• HTML logging (Trillian comparably has dual logging, plain text + XML)
• correctly shows the type of AIM user (mobile, bot, human) next to their icon
• “Psychic mode” plugin: causes conversation windows to appear as other users being to message you, before they finish typing
• supports more protocols than Trillian, if you care: Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, QQ, SILC
• better notification of the other party typing: the title bar of their tab gets colored green. Trillian only shows the “user is typing…” notification for the user in the active window
• no funky skins!
• no overbloating an IM client with non-IM gizmos
• the password is stored in plain text, but this is arguably a good thing

• the GTK UI is downright ugly sometimes, e.g. in the File->Open dialog (what was wrong with the Windows dialog ?!). Some windows do not preserve their size (e.g. the Plugins and View Log windows)
• Pidgin can’t automatically log your browser into Yahoo Mail (Trillian can, and it supports Firefox)
• can’t send introduction messages or your name to users you add as buddies (Yahoo Messenger allows that)
• On Windows, logs are stored by default in …\Application Data, but you can configure Pidgin to place logs anywhere
• receiving files via YM still doesn’t work
• Ctrl+F4 doesn’t close the tab as in Trillian (Ctrl+W still does)

4 years ago