Trillian comes to the Mac

AstraSomeone at the office pointed me to this announcement about Trillian coming out on Mac OS/X. Frankly, I was a bit shocked to find that someone with a Windows machine found out before I did—clearly, I’m not doing my job and staying on top of late-breaking news.

At any rate, I can’t wait. It’s only in alpha testing right now, but with a bit of luck I’ll be downloading Trillian within a month or two. I’ve used the Windows product—an excellent, multi-client instant messenger application—and have to say it’s hands-down the best tool available for keeping all your IM connections active (and not having to run half a dozen different ones).

There are other clients available, but they don’t hold a candle to the Windows edition of Trillian. Adium, for instance, supports many protocols but suffers from the unfortunate design decision of not automatically reconnecting after a network outage (the most effective way to reconnect is to quit Adium, and restart it—otherwise you must manually reconnect each IM account). And of course every Mac user knows about iChat, but it only supports AIM and .Mac IM accounts.