Martin Crockett

Miranda IM Vs. Trillian Pro

“Member Since: November 28, 2003″
“Your membership expiration date is set to Saturday, November 27, 2004 ”

Shall I shell out another $25 for 12 months usage of Trillian Pro? Let’s weigh up the options. I used Miranda IM back in early-2003. I loved it’s speed, low-overhead and ’small app’ appeal. I got hold of Trillian Pro on the advice/backing of some peers and was attracted by it’s popularity and user-friendly UI.

Lately, I’ve questioned this move. This was highlighted recently when I emailled support about a long-standing issue I had.

This is what level of support a Pro licence buys you:

Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the creation of a trouble ticket regarding:”Web Aware”, a summary of which appears below.

There is no need to reply to this message right now. Your ticket has been assigned an ID of [ceruleanstudios.com #00000].

Please include the string:

[ceruleanstudios.com #00000]

in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. To do so, you may reply to this message.

Thank you,
pro-support@ceruleanstudios.com

Dated Monday 5th July 2004

No replies so far!

Checking the support history returns the following error message on the page: “Couldn’t connect at this time. Please try later.”

Performance

Shall we mention memory consumption? Trillian Pro is a little bit of a heavyweight compared with Miranda IM. I took this screen capture of the task manager of the two applications running at the same time. Note: I wasn’t logged into Trillian per se. I just had it running in the background.

[See screenshot]

Plug-ins

Trillian Pro has plugins. Miranda IM has everything plus the kitchen sink as a plugin. It’s so much more extensible (extendable?).

Jabber

For a recent work project, I was introduced to Jabber. I signed up and got myself online with it. Can’t say I have any complaints so far. Just another protocol.

So, I’ve taken the jump back to Miranda IM. Will report as soon as I get further down the road with it.

Links:
Miranda IM
Trillian