Trillian was updated to v3.1on Thursday. I have been away from my Windows machine since then, so I didn’t find out until tonight. 3.1 adds quite a few major features in my opinion. One major addition is UPnP support for routers. This means that if you are behind a router that supports UPnP (Universal Plug n’ Play), file transfers should have a much higher success rate now. Failed file transfers have always been a common frustration with Trillian, but should finally be resolved. Trillian 3.1 also brings some coding enhancements that have increased speed while decreasing the size of the application, an impressive feat indeed. Also, now when you type URLs or emoticons, they show up formatted in your text box before you send it out. This means a URL turns into a link, and 
turns into a little yellow face (or whatever may be your current emoticon set) in your text box before you send the message. Many users will also rejoice when they find that Trillian finally supports HTML in profiles, something that has been a long time coming.
One of the most important changes for me personally is how contact lists between multiple accounts are now handled. In the past, when you logged into AIM with more than one AIM account, the buddy lists of the accounts were merged. This means if Sue was a contact for AIM account #1, and Joe was a contact for AIM account #2, both Sue and Joe became contacts for both AIM accounts. This wasn’t a major deal in the beginning, but after a couple of years I found it nearly impossible to remove people from my buddy list because as soon as I logged in with an old AIM account anyone I had deleted was added back to my current list! Somewhere along the line Trillian added the ability to create identities, which allowed you to keep multiple buddy lists separate, but this caused the length of your buddy list to increase along with the number of identities you set, and each contact was listed multiple times.
In Trillian 3.1 when you log on with more than one account all of your contacts show up in your list together, but they are not merged. When you sign one account off the contacts that belong to its list sign off along with it. This seems like the perfect solution for me so far, and I’m interested to see how it works out in the long run.
I also feel like the preferences menus have changed quite a bit, and for the better, but these changes are difficult to quantify. If you are a current Trillian user be sure to get this update, as it promises to fix a lot of issues which may be bugging you. If you aren’t a current Trillian user and are still using something like AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or ICQ, I recommend you head over to www.trillian.cc right away and download a copy of Trillian Basic 3.1. Of course, this only applies to Windows users, and OSX users will have to look to Adium for a the most Trillian-like IM solution.
I’d still like to see some more plugins (ok, I don’t know what, so don’t ask) and more themes… but otherwise I really like Trillian!
Hopefully now that both the pay and free versions of Trillian are back together development-wise (no more Trillian 0.74 and Pro 2.0) we will see skins start to come out again.