Endless Paradigm

Hi guys, I wonder if anyone here does know a bit about Trillian skinning, Trillian Astra to be precise.

I found an amazing skin for it called Bleach, that makes everything, even the chat windows glassy on Vista, it's only missing one of Astras features that I would like to add.

In other Trillian Astra skins you can display your chat in a sort of speech bubbles, the feature is called Chat Views.
I looked through the .inis and .xmls of a speech bubble enabled skin but I couldn't really find something about Chat Views so I would be grateful if someone that has Trillian Knowledge could help me out here.

(The Author of Bleach wanted to release an updated version with Chat Views at the end of March, he even posted a screenshot with Bubble chat but nothing has happened...)  

Thanks for help in advance

im a paying trillian user for 7 years and i couldnt get beta access to astra :(  sorry i would like to help :(

No problem SchmilK^^ That's a thing that's ridiculous about Astra... it's in closed Alpha for over a year and the fact that paying users wouldn't get an Alpha slot is unbelievable... I can say it's more then ready for public access yet they want to polish the Astra Medium further. I wonder why wee need another network. Well don't get me wrong I love Astra but some things are beyond joking.

Back to topic, do you maybe have experience with Trillian 3.1 skinning? Astra works to 99% the same way, I wouldn't even need to write something new. From what I get, I would only need to find the section that handles the chat view and then tell Bleach to look in this section from other themes. Many Astra custom skins refer to the original Astra skin .inis/.xmls in great parts so that should work.

A bit off-topic, but I'm curious, how good is Trillian? I mean, can I have full interaction like file transfer and stuff with friends on other chat clients?

Hmm, never actually heard of Astra.  Used to use Trillian, but switched to Pidgin cause it's actually being updated.

Dunno if this helps, but in my old installation of Trillian, there's a skins folder.  Inside, there's some XMLs/INIs as you described as well as an images folder.  I'd firstly go to the images folder to see if I can find the image, then search the XML/INI files for references to those images.

SchmilK Wrote:im a paying trillian user for 7 years and i couldnt get beta access to astra :(  sorry i would like to help :(

I was a paying Trillian user for a month and I got access

Paying Trillian users are supposed to get access to Astra by now.

metalgear08 Wrote:A bit off-topic, but I'm curious, how good is Trillian? I mean, can I have full interaction like file transfer and stuff with friends on other chat clients?

Trillian is awful..

Trillian Astra is superb - I highly recommend it.

Lucky Anubis...^^

@metalgear08:
Astra is great, you can have File Transfers and other stuff, the only thing that isn't yet implanted is Audio/Video chat over the open clients

@Zinga:
The folder/skin structure is exactly the same in Astra and I found the image of the bubble chat.... however it can't find the name in any file :o

I got an idea.... Anubis, as an official Astra User could you maybe ask in the official Astra forum for an easy way to implant bubble chat to a skin? Would be very nice of you

Have you ever used Trillian Astra?

The speech bubbles seem to be called displaytextlocal.png and displaytextremote.png

They seem to be resized dynamically depending on the text

Although I can't really recall where the other colored bubbles are shown.

metalgear08 Wrote:A bit off-topic, but I'm curious, how good is Trillian? I mean, can I have full interaction like file transfer and stuff with friends on other chat clients?

Only big difference I've found so far is you can't play games over trillian that you can over other chat clients (like msn games). So you have to open them up for that.  But most people don't play those games anyways.  Other than that, everything else works the same.  Also, I like the mini-definitions that appear with many keywords while you chat.