At the beginning of May I switched over to Trillian from Gaim. I really like Gaim, but it gets extremely frustrating when trying to use File Transfer or DirectIM over the AIM protocol on Gaim. I know I’m behind a firewall and many other people are too, but DirectIM works perfectly fine in AIM itself and even in Trillian, so why can’t it work through Gaim? Signing on just to receive pictures in an IM is a big hassle, especially after people try to DirectConnect 3 or 4 times with no success. Other people are bothered by this flaw too and heated words have been tossed about.

Trillian (I’m using the free version) seems like a pretty good client. My complaints about it are probably minor, but hey, a preference is a preference. I dislike text based logs; I much prefer HTML based ones. Also, I got very used to the Away Message settings and functionality of Gaim. There are just less mouse clicks to get what I want. I like to put up where I’m working every day in my away messages and in Gaim I can put the old one up and it’s a quick “Edit Message” click to just update it. With Trillian I have to create a new message every day and then deliberately not save it so as to not get a huge build up of old away messages. Gaim also allows me to fake my idle time, which can be nice occasionally. Normally I never “hide” from anyone online, but I’ve wanted to a few times. It’s nice to know I can.

I think I’ve concluded that having nice HTML logs is more important to me than the convenience of DirectIM which I rarely use. I’m switching back.

tags: software, IM clients, Trillian, Gaim