Trillian usage tips

The first Trillian usage tip, is to use it. If you use, or wish to try, instant messaging, Trillian is the best solution. It connects to multiple services that your friends might use, so you can sign up to use one or serveral services. It avoids the advertising the other clients bombard you with. And, it supports "emotisounds".

These usage tips in some places may assume that you have followed my Recommended Trillian preferences. If you have not, just be aware that some of your variant settings may cause Trillian to behave differently than described here.

One thing to know about Trillian: right click on any window to get a large context menu of available options for that window. There is little in the way of menu items, except by right clicking. A few icons appear at the top of windows for a few operations, but most of the features and customizations are to be found by right clicking. (Right clicking to get a context menu is often handy in many other programs, and all versions of Windows newer than Windows 98.)

If you have a question that isn't answered here, you might find it at the Trillian web site's Help Center.

Starting Trillian

I recommend that Trillian be started automatically when you boot up. If so, one of the following icons will generally appear in the Windows system tray (near the clock in the Windows task bar, usually at the other end of the task bar from the Windows Start menu). The icons are listed along with what they mean, and some possible actions you might want to take. If you left click on the icon, you will get a Trillian Contact List window. If you right click on the icon, you will get the Trillian system tray popup menu.

If you don't see any of these icons in the system tray, then you can probably find one the normal icon either on your desktop, or in a toolbar, or in the Start Menu (usually Start / Programs / Trillian / Trillian). Once you start it, you should then find an icon in the system tray.

Icon	Meaning	Action
	Normal icon. Trillian is fully connected.	No action needed. If you are leaving the computer on-line, but will not be there, you might want to set the status to Away.
	Away icon. Trillian is in away mode. If you have set an away message, people that try to contact you will have it delivered to them. Your status is marked as away.	If are you going to be on-line at the computer, you might want to set the status to Back.
	Partially connected. You are probably on-line, but one of the IM services for which you have an identity probably has or had a problem, that disconnected you.	You can try the "global reconnect" option on the Trillian popup menu (see the section "Trillian components" for what that looks like). If it switches to the normal icon, and stays there, all is well. If it goes back to the partially connected state, it probably means that one of the services is currently having problems. If you have recently added an MSN id, and that is the one that isn't connected, you may need to exit Trillian, and restart it, or possibly reboot your computer and reconnect to the internet. Make sure you are not logged in via another IM client on this or another computer, as that can disconnect your Trillian log in. "Global reconnect" usually fixes this temporarily, but if it keeps happening, you should turn off your other IM clients, using their preferences.
	Disconnected. You may be off-line, or your ISP may have a problem connecting to the internet, or all the IM services for which you have an identity may have a problem.	If you think you are on-line, and if you can access other internet servics such as email and web pages, then it is probably just that all the services have had problems, or that Trillian just hasn't gotten around to reconnecting to them since you came on-line. The same options as for Partially connected are appropriate.

If when you start Trillian, you get a dialog box informing you that you already have a copy of Trillian running, you should probably reboot your computer (or at least use the Task Manager to shut down the copy of Trillian for which you cannot find the icon in the system tray, leading you to believe that it wasn't running).

Exiting Trillian

The Trillian system tray popup menu has a selection for exiting Trillian.

Trillian components

If you left click the Trillian icon in the system tray, it will display the Trillian contact (buddy) list, which might look approximately like this.
Trillian contact list

It might look even more like this, if you use the View menu, and click "Hide My Identity Panel", and then again, clicking "My Mail Accounts" (both of which I find to be just clutter: I just want to see my buddy list).

The row of 5 differently colored balls to the right and slightly above the large ball icon shows the 5 different IM systems that Trillian supports. Here is the color code for the 5 systems:

IM service	Color
AIM (AOL)	Yellow
ICQ (AOL)	Green
IRC (Internet Relay Chat)	Grey
MSN (Microsoft Network)	Blue
Y! (Yahoo)	Red

In the row of balls, a solid ball means that you have at least one identity on that system, and that it is connected. A hollow ball means you do not have an identity on that system, or that it is not connected. Hovering over the ball will get you a tooltip that explains more about individual systems, identities, and statuses.

In the contact list, buddies for a particular system are shown in the color for that system. A hollow ball icon indicates that buddy is off-line, whereas a solid ball icon indicates that buddy is on-line. The buddies can be sorted and grouped in various ways. You can see that my buddies have been grouped by the name of the service (redundant with the color, and I may eliminate that grouping, but the default import from having used other IM clients first yields this result). I also have "Hide offline contacts" and "Suppress empty groups" selected, which means that the top portion of the contact list contains the on-line buddies, and that no groups are shown that do not presently contain any on-line buddies. AIM and MSN are the most full-featured services, and also have the most users. I recommend them in the following order: AIM, MSN, Y!, ICQ. IRC is quite different than the other services, and perhaps more powerful overall, but requires more understand to harness that power..

If you wish to start a conversation with one of your buddies,

simply double click their name in the contact list. This will pop up a new conversation window, which might look approximately like this:

Note that the yellow ball in the upper left corner of this sample window indicates that this is a connection to via AIM. The color of the ball changes for connections via other systems. Of course, you implicitly selected which system to use by selecting a buddy on that system. Just to the right of the ball is the name of the buddy you are communicating with in this window. Below that is a row of icons with a selection of specific features for this system (the row varies with system). If you figure out what the icons are, fine, you can use them, but all the features available on the icons are also available by right clicking in the conversation panel which is the next (and largest) area of the conversation window. The picture in the corner is called a "buddy icon" which is only available via AIM, and in the case of this particular buddy, they have chosen to put a thumbnail picture of themselves as their buddy icon. The buddy icon is a 48x48 pixel .jpg file, so you can crop and shrink a photo to create a new buddy icon, or you can pick from the many available clipart icons at AOL. Below the conversation panel, is another row of icons. These select dynamic text appearance features for the text you might type in the bottom panel. The last icon there allows you to select from emoticons that can be included with your text. Trillian has a much larger selection of emoticons than other systems, so be warned that not all of them will appear as icons to any of your buddies not using Trillian. There are a few emoticons that also come with emotisounds, which are only known to Trillian. You type your text in the text entry panel, and when you hit Enter or click the SEND button in the lower right, your text is transmitted to you buddy, and also moves into the conversation panel, clearing the text entry panel again. If you right click the Trillian icon in the system tray, it will display the Trillian system tray popup menu, which might look like this....

The "Connections" entry (shown selected and expanded) is where you go to manage your connections (including creating new identities for yourself--see next section), to make sure you are globally connected, or to globally disconnect, if you wish to. "Set Status" allows you to create or turn on or off a variety of Away messages specifying your status when you are not right at the computer, or wish not to be disturbed.

Adding a new identity for oneself

The connection manager

is used to create a new identity for a particular IM system. Here is a typical one with a number of IDs. When you click "Add a new connection" you will be allowed to choose which IM system the new connection will be for. Then you will get a menu like that below (which is for AIM) where you can fill in the name you obtained from the IM provider. The "Register for a new account..." button is if you need to create a new account with the IM provider... it will take you to the appropriate place on their web site to do so.

You don't need to download any client software from their web sites, even though they encourage that, as you will be using Trillian instead. You can use multiple identities on each system with Trillian. Generally you would want to "Automatically connect to this account on startup" once it is established. The "Change..." button allows you to change settings unique to the particular IM system for a particular ID.

Adding a buddy to the contact list

A new buddy can be added by right clicking on the contact list window and choosing "Add...". The resulting "Buddy Wizard" allows you to create new groups and select a particular group for your new buddies, if you wish, but you can also add them directly in Root (which is easiest until you have many buddies). On the first page of the buddy wizard, it is important to select the correct IM system to which the buddy name you are about to add applies. Then click Next. On the second page of the Buddy Wizard, you can type in the buddy contact information you obtained from your buddy, and click the "Add Buddy!" button. You can add several buddies in one session if you like, and then click the "Done" button.

Remove a buddy from your contact list

Right click the name of the buddy in the contact list, and choose "Remove..." from the context menu.

Rename your buddy

Right click the name of the buddy in the contact list, and choose "Rename Contact". Put in a new name. Some buddies pick strange sequences for their name, which are hard to remember. By renaming them to something that makes sense to you, you avoid forgetting who they are!

File transfer

You can transfer files via Trillian, to on-line buddies using AIM or MSN. There is an icon in the conversation window from which you can start, or you can drag-n-drop a file from Windows Explorer to the conversation window, or to the buddy's name in the contact list, which will start a conversation window with a file transfer. A recommended Trillian option also results in a context menu entry for files in Windows Explorer called "Send File To" which can initiate a file transfer to a selected buddy.

Status monitoring -- "Are you really on-line? Talk to yourself!"

For testing to see whether or not you are online on a particular service, one could use the status icons at the bottom of the buddy list--if the appropriate colored ball is solid, Trillian thinks it is connected to the corresponding service; if hollow, it thinks not. However, to find out whether or not the service itself thinks you are connected, you can add yourself as your own self-buddy. This gives a "through the service loopback" self-status--does the service think you are on-line enough to tell you that you are. AIM, ICQ, Y!, and MSN will all let you add yourself as a self-buddy, although MSN and Y! will ask for confirmation that you are allowed to see your self-status. AIM, ICQ, and Y! actually let you converse with yourself; MSN gives an error when you try to create a self-chat window, but does let you see your self-status. The advantage of self-status is that it works even when none of your buddies are on-line.