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Frustrations with AIM and Trillian

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For a couple of years, I’ve used Trillian for my instant messaging client. I’ve stopped recently, though, because of problems with Trillian. I wrote a longer post about this on my personal blog last month, but basically, my two big complaints are that Trillian doesn’t support the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) on Tablet PC’s, and there’s no support for MSN Alerts. Even the new release of Trillian 3 doesn’t support TIP or MSN Alerts, and there’s no indication I could find as to when, if ever, it will.

Because of the lack of MSN Alerts support with Trillian, I’ve been using MSN Messenger for the last few months, and recently started using the beta. And I’ve been really happy with it. But most of my friends are using AOL Instant Messenger, so for that, I switched to AOL’s AIM client.

AIM does support TIP, so at least I can use it on my Tablet PC in slate mode. But much of the UI is rather frustrating. The most annoying thing it does is pop the Buddy List and ‘AIM Today’ windows to the front whenever I sign in. This means that I open my laptop, start using it, and a couple of minutes later, when it decides to notice that I have a network connection, I suddenly get these two extra windows popping up. I’d love to find out how to get rid of that feature.

Two features I miss from Trillian:

  • The ability to rename contacts. I have a hard time remembering who owns the screen name “koswrgex793”. With Trillian, I could rename the contact to something easier (say, “Bob”).
  • Logging. Trillian could log conversations; I’ve found no way to do it with AIM. I found a few references to logging programs for AIM on Google, but most of what I found indicated that it was for earlier versions of AIM and was no longer compatible. On the other hand, I remember hearing that Google’s desktop search tool could search AIM conversation logs, so it seems like there must be some way to do this. Maybe I’m just missing something.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2005
    Disabling Aim Today:
    Edit Options -> Sign On/Sign Off -> Uncheck show Aim.com window

    Loggin:
    I personally use DeadAIM (JDennis.net), but you are correct it does not currently work with version 5.9. Another excellent alternative for logging is the IMSmarter service (IMSmarter.net) which logs your conversations on a web-accessible central server so you can search your logs from anywhere. It also has a nifty built-in reminders system, blogging functionality and some other cool features on the way.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2005
    I'm persisting with Trillian, but I'm also frustrated by the lack of a good (managed would be lovely, but even just COM would be nice) API, persistant crashing from the Jabber plugin when/if I use it (which is getting to be rare).

    Tempted to write my own client - only problem would be the protocols since I don't have much time and nobody offers an API for their IM networks bar the jabber lot!!
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2005
    Try Gaim for Aol. It works much better than the stock aim client.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2005
    I started using Trillian the other day as I recently added MS messenger to my list of chat progz. I miss the Yahoo "Ding!" (Ctrl+G) doorbell sound, I can't send that to get friends' attention via Trillian.

    Or can I?
  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2005
    I am actually hoping that Jabber gains more popularity soon, Jabber is an open based protocol for instant messaging, with a great many .net clients and servers out there. The cool thing is the possabilities of it. If it really starts to gain momentum then then I htink issues like AIM's constant advertising security problems and so on will go away. Oh and there are Java based Jabber clients and servers out there as well. But Jabber works very much like an email address RourNickName@YourDomain.com but comes in as Jabber Request then your server at your domain can then pass it to your client. The nice things is all these servers clients everything can be different OS's Servers and even clients and servers as long as they follow the Jabber protocols then all will work nicely.

    http://www.jabber.org/ for more reading
  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2005
    I have been using Trillian for awhile because I don't want to have more than one IM Client. Trillian crashes about every two weeks and I have to delete all my settings and reload. I just live with it... I perfer the MSN client but most of my contacts are in AIM. One cool thing about Trillian is the plugin that watches your computers shares. Perfect if you share lots of folders on your network.

    http://www.doyousnap.com/portal/albums/7/56.aspx
  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2005
    Trillian has a critical data-loss bug that prevents me from using it.

    Put your computer in standby mode... Watch your status from another computer. It says you are still online. So, send a message... it appears to go through. However, the computer in standby never receives it, and you never know you just lost a message.

    This is horrible!!!
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2007
    PingBack from http://feeds.maxblog.eu/item_1026672.html