Webware

This weekend has been a rather busy one for iPhone developers. Adobe Systems hosted the iPhoneDevCamp in its San Francisco offices, and the result is 50 new Web apps specifically designed for Apple's shiny new toy. Earlier today we wrote about some of our favorites, although one of the more important ones that didn't come out the developer's event was the new iPhone-optimized version of Trillian from Cerulean Studios. From the looks of the pictures on their blog, it looks a lot like iChat, and more important is finger- and eye-friendly, especially when compared to Meebo's current offerings.

Instead of emulating the desktop chat experience, Trillian for the iPhone turns your screen into one big buddy list. You can keep track of active conversations on top of your friends list, and jump between active conversations in one place without juggling windows.

The one snag? It's not available yet. Cerulean is planning to roll it out to testers of its upcoming chat program Astra in the next week or so. In the meantime, the company has left a tantalizing screenshot, and a sign-up page for eager early adopters.

Trillian users will soon be able to IM on their iPhone with a fairly similar iChat-like interface.

(Credit: Cerulean Studios)

This nearly slipped by our radar last week, but in the latest build of the upcoming chat client Trillian Astra, Cerulean Studios has snuck in desktop versions of its widgets. Users can now place widgets in their Trillian buddy list or right on their desktop, similar to what you'd get with the Yahoo Widget engine, or other desktop widget tools. Users are also able to send them between the buddy list and desktop via right clicking, or they can simply drag and drop.

For now there are just five sample widgets, but assuming Cerulean Studios opens things up a bit, or goes with universal widget coding, Trillian users could get what is typically two applications in one, along with a wide array of desktop widgets.

Customizing the widgets is a little harder than it should be, as you can't just configure each one once it's on your desktop. Everything is handled through a preferences menu, although I'm assuming this will be changed as the application gets closer to release. Some sample widgets do look neat; the weather widget in particular is easy to read and fully animated. And the world-time widget shows when the sun is hitting your current location, which is totally nerd eye-candy.

Similar to other widget tools, Astra has a hot key that let users pull up all the running widgets at the same time. Pressing the Windows key and space bar accomplishes this easily, although it doesn't have nearly the same effect you get with OS X's Dashboard widget.

I wouldn't recommend you ditch your current widget engine just yet, since this is a brand-new feature on an application that's still in private alpha. I am, however, excited to see if this feature will be integrated into the forthcoming browser-free version of the app.

For more shots of the new widget runtime environment, keep reading.

Widgets can reside on your desktop or right in your buddy list.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Trillian Astra is the next generation of Trillian, the popular multi-account instant messenger from Cerulean Studios. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the alpha build of Astra this morning and muck around with some of its new functionality. The alpha build lacked some of the new features being pitched on the Astra preview site.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Astra is pretty. Really pretty. The new default skin called 'Cordonata' has that slick plastic look you'd find on Mac OS X or Windows Vista. It's also functional, taking up no more onscreen space than the current version of Trillian does. Message windows also seem better designed to handle tabs, and have a larger, more user-friendly design. Options for sending files and setting up conferences are at the bottom of message windows instead of the top, cutting down on clutter. You're also given a news ticker of sorts, which monitors your conversation and brings up content based on what you're talking about with your buddies. While talking with a friend of mine about his Nintendo DS, it brought up a news clipping for CNET's coverage of StumbleUpon's Wii viewer. This was a little creepy.

New to Astra are widgets, which can be added to a customized status bar that can be embedded into forums, Web sites and e-mails. Widgets are created by community developers and provide things like local weather information, mood, and pictures from Flickr. You can see examples of this at Cerulean's forums.

Also cool, but unfortunately not working well enough for me to fully test was the Astra Web interface, where you can login from any Web browser to chat with your buddies. As with Meebo, the interface looks like a desktop application.

A neat addition to Astra is the new framework given to designers for creating advanced skins. While the default theme is slick and good looking, choice is a good thing. Also tweaked is the ability to change skins without having to restart the app.

Trillian Astra also includes plug-ins for newer IM networks such as MySpace and Google Talk. (You could use Google Talk before, but you had to download the Jabber plug-in and edit the settings.) Likewise, to IM via MySpace required a software download and install. Adding both of these protocols to the core client is great.

No news on a solid launch date for Astra. In the meantime, if you want to sign-up for Astra testing, click here.

Have any questions about Astra? Ask in comments, and we'll try to answer.

Update: This post has been changed since it's original publish. Corrections were made regarding widgets and chat feeds.