Trillian Astra – The Dark Side (of skins)

I don’t have enough time to make a short post here, so I’ll likely be leaving a long, rambling one.  You’ve been warned.  ;)

I’m a Trillian user.  I love it.  I bought it, I will continue to give them money as long as their product continues to meet my need of having EVERY chat network known to man connected at the same time.  I know my IRC pals laugh at me for using Trillian, but whatever.

There were a couple of things I wasn’t crazy about in Trillian Astra, however.  The primary being that the default skin was bulky, and the included secondary, minimalist skin (Cobalt) didn’t contain any dark themes.  I’m sorry, but using a white background on chat windows just makes me feel, as a friend said, “flashbanged” every time I chat.

Surprisingly, there aren’t that many good skins out yet using the new features provided by Astra.  There are a few, however, if you can figure out where to look.  So I’m going to make that easier here and provide a collection of links to resources I used to get what amounts to a dark version of Cobalt.

Listing: A list of Astra Skins, Plug-ins and Mods
Skins: Cobalt Black Magick (Fixed) | Avion Pro

There, maybe I’ll come back later and write up how to disable specific sounds without losing the ones you want.

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Update – 01.20.2010 – A new Trillian build was released today that improved, among other things, Trillian’s support for Twitter.  This could change the way I use Twitter, moving me away from TweetDeck.  However, the skin I had been using (Cobalt Black Magick) doesn’t yet support the new character counter functionality.  So I’ve added a link to the other skin I love from the list, Avion Pro. – DG