Software update: Trillian Astra 4.0 build 117

The developers of Cerulean Studios have finally released the final release of the instant messenger Trillian Astra 4.0 after two years of development. Trillian Astra allows chatting with users of a variety of instant messaging and social networks, including Windows Live, ICQ, Skype (no voice), Twitter and Facebook. Currently there is only a client for Windows and a version that runs in a web browser, but clients for Mac OS X and the iPhone are in development. Below is the announcement of this release:

Trillian Astra!
Today we’re happy to announce the marking of Build 117 as a gold version of Trillian Astra. Thousands of Trillian users are already relying on Astra as their day-to-day communications tool, many major bugs and crashes have been resolved, and we’re very pleased with the overall stability and functionality of the product! Trillian Astra is available as a free download, and our Pro version sells for $25, or $10 for upgrading customers. Our new store is online, and we’re also proud to stand behind our 30-day refund policy for any dissatisfied customer.

We want to thank all of our beta testers and customers for their support over the past few years. It’s been a long road for us all and we couldn’t have built Trillian without your support and passion for the product. We hope you continue to enjoy Trillian as much as we continue to enjoy building it, and look forward to getting back to work on exciting improvements and feature requests for Trillian 4.1 and beyond! If you haven’t tried Trillian Astra yet, please give it a spin and let us know what you think. If you’re already a customer, please help us spread the word about the product and get your friends chatting on Astra!

So what’s next for Cerulean Studios and Trillian?

Development
During our 3.x cycle, we were often criticized for a lack of development transparency and slow builds. For over two years now, we’ve been steadily updating our blog and releasing builds on a semi-weekly basis! We’re very happy with the new development process and we hope you are too. Look for this to continue moving forward – although Trillian is stable enough to be used daily, we’ll keep fixing bugs and releasing new builds of the 4.0 branch whenever we deem it necessary. We will be slowing the 4.0 builds down a little bit – noone likes software that updates itself every other day – but when batches of bugs are found and fixed we will push out updates! Our current goal is to ensure the launch goes smoothly, fix anything major that crops up, and then aim for regular maintenance builds on a monthly basis. Don’t worry if you think we missed a bug or two – while we’re confident in the overall stability of the product, we’re aware that nothing is perfect and will continue to improve Trillian.

Trillian 4.1
Trillian 4.1 is already being worked on. We have an exciting batch of new features in store for you and have been closely following feature requests filed against the 4.0 product. Once certain internal milestones are reached, we’ll be putting 4.1 out for beta testing in the same way we’ve done with 4.0. Stay tuned to our blog for more details as they become available.

Cross platform, mobile devices
We’re also continuing our work on all of the new versions of Trillian we’ve announced for other platforms. The iPhone version is nearly ready for submission to the App Store, the Web version will continue to get upgrades inside the 4.1 development cycle, and we’ll be talking in more depth about the long-awaited Trillian for OS X as well.

Again, thank you to everyone who has supported us and we do hope you enjoy Trillian Astra. We’re off to work on 4.1!