Now that the news is out, the sneak preview of Trillian Astra is released, my brain is unnerved and my veins are untangled.  There is so much to talk about in the preview.  While I will leave the crucial material for the official blog, here I will talk about the design process, how things are done, and boring theoratical things.

While I will have some personal blogs once in a while, I’ll outline a list of things I want to cover for Trillian Astra, which is based the things I invented for and contributed to this 2-year-long project:

1. The Very Front-End UI: Trillian Cordonata with its contact list, chat windows; its birth, its construction and its evolution.  Lots of sub-topics such as the bottom ‘Intelligent Toolbar’, the new chat tools, new emoticons, etc.  The skin underwent more than 100 builds and adapted to design changes throughout a whole year.
2. “Social Widgets” + Social Profile: The most brilliant idea ever!  My invention of one of the highlights of the show!  Turning boring social profiles into dynamic data and information space is one exciting idea to be explored.  Today everyone’s profile either look like a crappy HTML site or a medical record (I do understand the value of the former type), but Trillian Astra is going to blow all these away.  So…How it came up, designed, turned into specs and its potential impact to the web.
3. Widgets: Each widget have their story behind them.  Our goal is to make the client “as alive as a living creature”, like the Web personified.
4. SkinXML: The most nerdy type of art ever invented.  Geek talk.
5. Promotion material and things like web site, sneak preview, etc.
6. Last but not the least, it is the exciting and censored (hahaha) TRILLIAN ASTRA VERSUS THE WORLD DEATHMATCH. I will compare Trillian Astra with other messengers ‘fairly’, in terms of UI, of course.

So… stay tuned!

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the skin was all drawn in vector.

Before I make another blog post, I would like to thank everyone who supported the Trillian project, readers and bloggers around the world who raved about this stunning up-and-coming product.  Here are a few comments that I love the most:

Johnny at Popgadget had probably the best write-up on Trillian Astra.  He really digested the whole tour and summarized what we did very well!  He said,

Taking these independent services and weaving them together to create an always updated interdependent web presence is a lofty goal, and Trillian aims to make that happen with Astra.

Corey Clayton had some very interesting correlations between Trillian Astra the instant messenger and Trillian McMillan the original character from Hitchhiker’s Guide, played by “geek goddess Zooey Deschanel”.  I guess we do need to include that gun Trillian is holding in the picture to do something fun…

The site Aqua Regia coined my favorite term “Astra Planeta”, which means the gods of the five wandering stars or planets.  The author also summarized Trillian Astra and forecasted our future as if we finally see light at the end of the tunnel:

Probably the most exciting thing about this release is that Trillian is no longer just a chat client. With the Astra release, the Cerulean team has quietly built its own chat network and web-based instant messaging platform, a serious shot across the bow to Meebo and a number of other related companies.

TechCrunch still has a lot of faith in us.  I’m glad, because after all we hadn’t even said a word in public for a whole year and nothing released for 2 years.  They said,

If Cerulean can pull it all off, and there’s every reason to believe they can, then this is going to be one smoking product.

Smoking?! Hell yes!  This is just half of the iceberg!  (Well, maybe 60%)  Meanwhile, Stowe Boyd said Trillian Astra is going to be his “Nerdvana” if everything is going to be accomplished.  I hope so too.  Should be as good as Smells Like Teen Spirit made into a software.

Oh, before I end this post, it’s so funny quite many people noticed my The Decemberists plug on the Sneak Preview tour movie!!  Here’s a few quotes from Digg:

Apparently Trillian Astra likes The Decemberists. Good enough for me.

Heh, I noticed that too. Gotta love The Decemberists.

Also fuck yeah to the Decemberists plug on there. They rock.

But /cheer for The Decemberists plug.

Lastly, I would like to thank Jark again for organizing the Trillian skinning contest at deviantArt back in the day, and he still remembers it!

And, and, and, last but not the least, since the UI is probably one of the most loved new ‘features’ on people’s list, this is my shameless love for this praise by “splash” on Digg:

God. Damn. That skin looks delicious in a Steve Jobs quote kind of way.

With more than half of the comments about how good it looks, we’re looking good, literally, this time.

In the very very end, I would like to thank again to all the Trillian users, the alpha team and all those from Trillian forums who gave us (and me) endless support and cheers!!!

As Trillian Astra is finally exposed and now sending shockwaves (literally because it’s in Flash) across the Internet, my company and I feel more liberated with higher spirits than ever before.

(Pictured above: Trillian Astra with Cordonata skin doing its zen.)

The sheer mass of information delivered by the Trillian Astra Sneak Preview is enough to get everyone excited for months to come.  We have been working under cover for so long, as some of the features introduced in Trillian Astra are truly unique and creative.  We don’t want the “Vista disaster” to happen to us, where people over-expect things for 5 years, just because we can’t keep our mouths shut…  (No offense to Microsoft here, I applaud your Office 2007 team.)  It’s some sort of Zen of patience for us, and for our users too, to wait for more than a year, as we build up our software and servers.

To announce “how Trillian Astra will change your web” is a great undertaking.  And to explode the clogged tubes of Web 2.0 is whimsical, but requires a great deal of courage to make that joke in front of millions of people watching it.  But we are that confident, well, we have to be.

So… with so much happened, so much happened throughout the past year, I can finally sit down here and talk about things that aren’t professional enough to go into the official blog, like stuff happening behind the scenes.

For those who read the Trillian forums zealously, you probably know about this already:

The fire is spreading all over the web now, but to light it up is just a mouse click – as Scott clicked the “Publish Blog” button on our Blogger account, at around noon on Tuesday, 21st November 2006 (after we had a meal at the Burger King and Andy got all the three Xbox 360 games that they offer, and I like the ‘Sneak King’ game the best).  We didn’t have any champagne, and I guess we’ll have to wait for Kevin to come back from Thanksgiving in order to really celebrate. (He worked till midnight on Monday though!) We had a plate with 3 plastic cups, and we poured a can of Coke into the cups – champagne style.  We should have done it with Red Bull.  Then that will be total caffeine style.  Oh, nevermind.  Someone send us a bottle of champagne. ;)

Okay, so now is another serious blog about UI design.  As an architecture graduate and also a ‘Head’ UI designer, I keep in touch with what’s going on around the UI world.  A few heroes of mine in this genre is Apple Design and Jensen Harris of the Office 12 team.

Apple designs are often worshipped for their simplicity, and their ability to convince the engineers that removing features is actually a good thing.  With intelligent solutions, Apple’s remote control for Front Row only has 6 buttons, and it pretty does all the things the Windows Media Center remote does.

Believe it or not, cutting down features is not easy.  On one hand, it is a lot of design decision and intelligent guesses (since we don’t have user data unlike rich companies such as Microsoft).  On the other hand, it’s like telling the developers to cut an arm off their babies.  Thirdly, the geekiest crowd will cry, no matter what.

This happened in the 2.0 to 3.0 era of Trillian, when we were faced with an increasingly complex Preferences window and context menus.  There were always a desire to simplify Trillian, but there was never the guts to do so.  Rethinking, reorganizing and removing is the process, and knowing what should be removed and which goes where was a difficult process.  There were also technical limitations as well that would dictate the position of certain items, which I have to design around and justify them.

It was pretty much like cleaning up your room.  However, instead of tucking away all the junk in boxes that you will never find again, you are building a whole new shelving system that houses everything and lets you access their quickly without creating a visual mess.

Most of our new features in Trillian Astra do not occur in the Preferences window, however, and instead they would be mostly present in the most often used windows such as the contact list and chat windows.  It presents a whole new problem as this is a software that presents changes in real-time, and a hierachical tabbed model in Preferences window does not always work because certain real-time information needs to be visible at all times.

Since Trillian Pro 1.0, the UI has adopted the default Windows-like Menu+Toolbar model, a common way to lay out a software, in attempt to lure commercial users since the previous UI in .7x was considered too wacky.  Having a standardized UI similar to the rest of the OS makes it ‘easy’ for new users to learn Trillian because menus and toolbars behave in the way they expect them to be.  However, the problem is that most of the menu items were forced – Trillian does not really have that many menu items and tools to choose from.  Back then, since we had limited functionalities in SkinXML, the menu bar becomes a place for items that would be given too much focus if shown as a toolbar button but too little focus and out of context if shown as a context menu.  A lot of items are duplicates of toolbar buttons as well, e.g. the edit bar button.  Therefore, the menu bar, especially the ones in chat window, is more of a filler to create a sense of familiarity for users (or for us so we are confident to sell it?).

Trillian Astra faces the problem on both sides: On one hand, we got a lot of fillers for the menu bar; but on the other hand, we have a lot of new features to fill up the windows.  Can’t we just put all the new features in menus?  No, because doing that just buries the new features and requires users to click a few times in order to get it.  So instead of trying to fit these new items into the current menu and toolbar model, why not just do away with the menus and toolbars?

That was the ‘radical’ decision made more than a year ago in August, when Microsoft has their new Windows Vista new UI waving around with no menu bars.  I was skeptical of their decision, but felt good because I could finally find a plausible excuse to break away from the Trillian Pro UI and “return to form”.  I don’t understand necessarily when Vista removed all their menu bars because they do have a lot of features need to be accessed, but I certainly agree that Trillian does not need it after all, since we don’t have much.  Office 12 demos came out a few months later, and confirmed my theory.

Even with a new vision, new technology was needed in Trillian to execute the new UI.  Back in 2.0, we could hardly make anything exciting because we were only limited to buttons, and the buttons could not change any other aspects of the window.  3.0 got worse as we had video and audio chat, tons of new buttons flooded in with panels and stuffs, making it impossible to make any freeform skins.

Fortunately, SkinXML in Trillian Astra, like (the better part of) 3.0, will continue its curve to introduce more variables, thus the ability for a much more flexible UI.  It allows us to create a richer user experience by categorizing new features in tabs (similar to Office 12′s “Ribbon” Menu Tabs but they are actual tabs as well).  I surfed the wave of these new UI trends and took advantage of it, creating the new re-organized default skin to be known as Trillian Cordonata.

With that said, it doesn’t mean we were trying to follow trends, but the trends allowed us to rethink what we are and should be.  There were other reasons for a brand new skin, which I will talk about later.

To keep you posted, here’s a small update of what’s going on… since two days ago.

In the office: Like what Scott had said, there is a pair of new skins to be a coherent set for the branding strategy of Trillian Astra.  They are pretty much all coded, polished and set to go and will be updated as each new build adds more features.  These days I’m off to do the less mission-critical things, like a finalized full implementation of Stixe Icon Packs.  So expect some serious fun when public alpha comes.

At home: I worked at home today.  Not very productive.  Spent too much time reading the forums and comparing Xbox 360 and the iTV.  I went to Home Depot early morning to get wood for building the lamp rack for my new kitchen…

My car was also fixed yesterday with a new and (unfortunate) expensive catalytic converter for the exhaust, so now it doesn’t sound like a biker driving down the street anymore.  Andy also taught me that all car mechanics tended to make oil seeping (normal) sound like oil leaking (big big problem).