Can no one produce a decent instant messaging client? I’ve been a big fan of Trillian for the last 5 years or so, but have been vaguely dissatisfied with it since the release of version 3.0. Chief among my problems:
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It keeps screwing up my contact list. I have my contact list divided up into groups for friend, people in my office, and contacts at the corporate mothership, but people keep showing up in the wrong group, no matter how many times I move them to the correct one. Also, I use aliases for all my contacts so that I don’t have to remember obscure AIM and MSN screen names. However, with certain contacts, it keeps switching back to the actual screen names. With previous versions, I could just edit the xml file where the contact list is stored and be done with it, but that seems to have no effect in the new version.
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All of the skins look like ass. I was willing to let this slide at first, since the new version had just come out, and perhaps there had not been enough time for decent-looking skins to be developed. However, it’s been months now, and while there are a few more options, they’re either ugly, or cheap-looking XP rip-offs. Who the hell wants something that looks like this?
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No way to shut off the splash screen. Really, people, I’m already using your product—do you really need to distract me with a garish “Trillian Loading…” splash every single time I start it up? You let me turn this option off in the old version, so why the change. (Maybe it’s buried somewhere in the preferences, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.)
I’ve tried Gaim a couple of times, but it’s ugly as hell, and has its own host of annoying little problems. I hate the fact that it can’t be minimized solely to the system tray, and it’s somewhat less than helpful that renaming one of the default contact list groups causes the app to crash. I’ve seen both of these problems (as well as a host of others) mentioned to the developers on various forums, and they are universally by “Only a loser M$ user would complain about this kind of thing, go back to Windoze” response that is standard among open-source zealots.
Maybe I’ll go back to the old version of Trillian—I think I still have the install .exe somewhere on one of the servers here.