Why Trillian Sucks Compared To Digsby

I had been a long time fan of Trillian. In fact, my oldest chat history dates back to 2001. Got tired of it though as version 3 had seemed to be never ending over the past few years. Went with Pidgin for awhile, then to Miranda and wound up back to Trillian by default as they still did not have some of the features that Trillian represented. Trillian Astra, which has been in beta for what feels like a decade, has been completely unstable and even if I wanted to use it, the Beta Signup never let me in.
Instant Messaging is crucial for me. As an essential aspect of my business, an Instant Messaging client is expected nowadays to be more than just for chats. Between the crash issues with Trillian and the resource hog it has always been, I had hoped for something better from the supposed king of multi-protocol clients. More frustrating, the lack of real competition from other clients.
Enter Digsby. I found this client back in November, and it has satisfied almost all of what I have wanted an instant messaging client to do.
Here are some performance/feature issues of Trillian that has made Digsby stand out:
- Slide Left Option? - Cannot change the orientation in which profiles or mail accounts appear (default: right) on hover. Running on a second monitor, I need to slide left instead. No option, no way to do this. Digsby allows this option, but automatically floats left by default, which I think would be the best way considering on where most people usually place their main window (Right corner)
-Access Mail - Mail accounts do not allow you to view emails like Digsby does by giving you a preview and allowing you to directly access the message. Unless if it’s Gmail. And even then, you can "see" the messages, but cannot perform actions such as view, preview, mark as read, delete, etc. as Digsby does.
-Understand My Identities - Does a poor job of signing you out of an account and into another like Digsby does. For instance, if you are logged into one Gmail account, and you click on a message from another Gmail account from within the chat client (or in Trillian's case, you can’t hover on the message, but can only click on the actual email account itself), Digsby will automatically switch your login status to the account in which the message is received from. Trillian does not do this.
-Preview emails - With Digsby, despite whatever email account (i.e. Yahoo, Live, Google), it will preview all unread emails with a hover ability to preview the contents of the email (usually the first paragraph). Trillian just tells you that you got a bunch of messages, but only gives you the option of clicking the account to open a browser to view the messages.
-Online accounts - So you're computer crashed, or you are at work, and you have no idea what the 20 usernames and passwords are to your chat identities are when you are installing a client. No worries. Install Digsby; put in your master user and pass, and bam, you got all your stuff set up - Identities, Mail Account, Categories of Peeps. Unlike the whole set up process you have to redo with Trillian Astra. Why even have an online Trillian account if it does not do this? Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the new key features of Astra?
-Social Networks - For business, this has been an increasingly important aspect of a chat client. Both Digsby and Trillian support the largest - Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and MySpace. If you have a chance to compare on how these are implemented and presented, there is no question that Digsby has this beat by far. For instance, if you are signed on to Facebook with Digsby, it automatically creates a category of contacts that are online on FB/LI/MS. Trillian not only does not have this feature, it makes it more frustrating. For instance, Trillian gives you the last 10 tweets and last 10 posts from FB. Wanna see more with the "View 10 more" link? It will take you to the page versus than keeping it in the chat client. The whole purpose with these feature is to keep actions solely on the client, not by opening a page. Kills efficiency and also kills the page you were on as it rather use the existing page you are on to open the 10 more rather than opening a new tab.
-Remember my order, damnit - Sorting your contacts is an important aspect of chat clients. I want to migrate my AIM, GMAIL, YAHOO, ICQ, LIVE and JABBER people to be part of universal categories (i.e. contacts from each of these services should be able to go to "My Faves" category created). Although you can do this with Trillian, once you close it out for the night, and re-open it, bam! Not only is the sorting gone, but the sorting that WORKED for Digsby is now all messed up. Massive fail when you have over 400 contacts.
-Preferences - I've been in the tech world for over 12 years now, and I'm not easily intimidated with set ups. But if you go through Trillian's preferences, it looks like they had no idea on really how to tie everything together to make it easy to perform what you want to do with it. Not only can it be condensed significantly, but even the menu options leave a lot to be desired. Trillian, I don’t want more anymore. I just want the basics to work right! Sadly, it fails here too compared to the straightforward options of Digsby.
With this rant, it’s not that Digsby is perfect. Rather, it’s just less imperfect than Trillian.
This is where Digsby can do better :
-Chat history is important. And the ability to search and view timelines of chats on Trillian is still far beyond what Digsby delivers.
-Facebook integration is still not 100%, as it often times does not keep the connection alive, as well as the fact that it has the issue of not logging back on when disconnected.
-Another online version - With the way that Digsby saves account information, there should be no reason why it should not be able to expand to offer an online messaging system such as meebo. It is something expected though as it enters the larger market.
All and all, there is a reason why I feel Digsby is gaining tremendous momentum. Its solid, support is very responsive, improvements are constantly being made and in less than a year, it has surpassed the stability of the 3 year old beta of Trillian Astra.
For me, as displayed by this rant, is really about the logic in design. Digsby has a strength in this area by the fact that it’s not trying to do 329749374 things at once by offering features and whatnots that only appeal to some. Instead, it's refining and putting importance on the core of what a client should be.
Don't get me wrong...with as long as I have used Trillian, I'd really like it to succeed and offer something great. However, if this new Trillian Astra beta is the representation of 3-4 years of development....well...it’s just sad.
I hope before they turn the system on and leave the beta stage behind, Trillian will address most of these issue and hopefully it won’t take another 3 years to produce these results. Until then, I choose Digsby.