Tips and Tricks-July 2005

Upgrades to Instant Messaging

Instant messaging has become an integral part of my way of communicating, both at work and at home. I have an assistant who is currently in India and various family and friends with whom I chat. I also work in two different offices and sometimes need to communicate or transfer files. I find that instead of picking up the phone, I will often go for my messaging software. I have accounts with a couple of messaging services because different folks are on different services.

I seldom log into one of the services because then I would have two or more windows open to connect and see all the different people. Help is available in the form of a couple of programs that will consolidate your instant messaging sources into one interface.

Trillian calls itself the Swiss Army knife of Instant Messaging and is from Cerulean Studios, http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/. It comes in two versions, basic and pro. Basic is free. It can be downloaded from any number of places, but I like http://www.download.com because I feel that it is a safe source.

The screen has some differences from the usual messaging screen. First, it shows the two mail accounts in the upper pane and contacts in the lower pane. That’s fairly standard. In the lower pane, an icon indicates which messenger service the contact is using. Apparently not everyone gets on line early Saturday morning.

Note the tabs across the top—that is one version of the interface. You can also apply different “skins” to the interface by downloading from the Cerulean web site.

The basic version supports connections to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, ICQ and Novell’s Groupwise. To connect to other sources, you need to purchase the Pro version for $25.00. Other features that are not included in the basic version include video chatting and related services, the ability to use plug-ins that include services like RSS feeds, weather, and connections to other services. For a complete list of features compared in the two versions, go to http://www.trillian.cc/compare/.

Another nice feature is the ability to set up different version for use by other users for those who share a computer.

Installation is fairly simple—you supply your user name and password for the supported products. You can modify a number of items using the Preferences selection from the menu. The features are many and too many to cover here, but you can learn more from the web site and from the user forums.

A second multi-protocol instant messaging client comes from SourceForge, home of many open source programs. GAIM is the name and it can be found at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/about.php. It is more like the “Buddy List” from AOL. You can add multiple accounts to the list and it displays all of the contacts according to the way they are shown by the specified service. For MSN, it shows the email address of the contact or “Individual” and for Yahoo, it shows the screen name.

As you can see, it is a much simpler interface and doesn’t retrieve email. There are fewer options, but it was very easy to set up and will collect from more sources than Trillian. The web site reports that it will work with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr. It has themes which are basically different sets of icons and smileys that can be downloaded.

It is constantly being upgraded (some security flaws were discovered early in the year) and they are posted regularly. Because it is open source, changes occur with some frequency.

GAIM runs on multiple platforms, including Linux and Mac OS X, as well as Ipaq and Sharp Zaurus PDAs.

Try either or both and let me know what you think.

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Copyright 2005

Banner Photo by Charles Scamahorn