Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Technicolor · Oct 16, 2002, 06:24 PM

How the heck does Trillian manage to have AIM file transfer, buddy icons and who knows what else, while every multi-client Mac app does not?

I understand that AOL makes 3rd party clients use a different server with limited features etc, etc. I'm really curiuous. Why can't Proteus, Adium, or Fire duplicate this functionality? As far as I know AOL isn't blocking Trillian anymore (or they're found a way around it without requiring an update every 48 hours).

I'm happy using Proteus or iChat or whatever but this is just one of those things that's been sticking in my craw lately.

Anybody care or have any insight on this?

AKcrab · Oct 16, 2002, 07:15 PM

Trillian is pure crap. I tried to use it on my windoze machine at work, and I just can't stand it.
Valid questions you have, though.

Guy Incognito · Oct 16, 2002, 07:25 PM

I may be wrong but the latest Proteus does support AIM file transfer...

plot twist · Oct 16, 2002, 07:28 PM

trillian reverse engineered the aim protocal. but, ichat now has libraries that use the official oscar protocal, so a mac application can now do this stuff without reverse engineering. someone just has to do it.

Technicolor · Oct 17, 2002, 12:43 AM

trillian reverse engineered the aim protocal. but, ichat now has libraries that use the official oscar protocal, so a mac application can now do this stuff without reverse engineering. someone just has to do it.

Seems like this would a hot commodity among the developers. I wonder why they've been reluctant to add those additional features, if indeed that is the case.

S|ntax · Oct 17, 2002, 05:17 AM

Originally posted by AKcrab:
Trillian is pure crap. I tried to use it on my windoze machine at work, and I just can't stand it.
Valid questions you have, though.

prior to the .72xx releases I would agree with you but 1.0 and the later .7 releases are the best chat clients out there. if you haven't tried it since 1.0 you really should. it blows everything else mac or pc away.

Guy Incognito · Oct 17, 2002, 08:31 AM

Originally posted by S|ntax:

prior to the .72xx releases I would agree with you but 1.0 and the later .7 releases are the best chat clients out there. if you haven't tried it since 1.0 you really should. it blows everything else mac or pc away.

I've tried the later .7 releases...Trillian still sucks compared to some of the multi-IM clients on the Mac despite it overflowing of useless client-specific features.

Maybe that's just because I enjoy a simple IM client and frown upon useless features that just adds to bloat.

mitchell_pgh · Oct 17, 2002, 10:00 AM

I'm just one person, but I'm tired of seeing all this CRAP included with IM. I can understand simple file transfers, but now they are tryign to get into video and photo crap... IM stands for instant message, not instant movie or file transfer, etc...

I just want catagories in iChat...

Guy Incognito · Oct 17, 2002, 10:29 AM

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I'm just one person, but I'm tired of seeing all this CRAP included with IM. I can understand simple file transfers, but now they are tryign to get into video and photo crap... IM stands for instant message, not instant movie or file transfer, etc...

I just want catagories in iChat...

I agree...this nonsense about cramming every possible feature into one tiny, supposedly-task-specific program is getting ridiculous. It might be the PC way to do things...but it's not that way on the Mac.

iCal is for calendaring. iTunes is for playing music. Address Book is for keeping contact info. They all serve one specific purpose, they all perform this single purpose rather well, and they communicate with the other programs when they need to borrow their expertise.

This is how it has to be...the modular approach wins.

The problem with PC apps is that they waste precious resources (time, money, hard drive space, memory space)...lots of PC apps try to implement their own chat services (some P2P clients), their own music player and video player (some P2P clients), their own file transfer methods (IM clients), etc...this is WRONG!

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this when other programs do it better than they can? I don't need file transfer in my IM client...why is it even implemented when the IM program could simply call an FTP app do download a file...redundant features waste my hard drive space and my memory space, and they waste precious development time that could be spent making the program better at what it's supposed to do.

Really...I'd much rather see something like iCal, Address Book and Mail than an all-in-one-supposed-solution such as Entourage.

If you're not interested in calendaring, too bad for you, you're stuck with it with Entourage. You don't need to use it but it's still loaded when you launch Entourage, it's still wasting your HD space, it's still hogging memory space. If you prefer another calendaring app to Entourage's, tough luck, Entourage won't play well with other calendaring apps.

Modular apps such as Mail, iCal, and Address Book combined with good communication between them and the fact that other apps can use these apps individually to fit their needs is a godsend.

Remember kids, feature redundancy is bloat. Say NO to bloat (and drugs.)

kmkkid · Oct 17, 2002, 12:42 PM

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:

I agree...this nonsense about cramming every possible feature into one tiny, supposedly-task-specific program is getting ridiculous. It might be the PC way to do things...but it's not that way on the Mac.

iCal is for calendaring. iTunes is for playing music. Address Book is for keeping contact info. They all serve one specific purpose, they all perform this single purpose rather well, and they communicate with the other programs when they need to borrow their expertise.

This is how it has to be...the modular approach wins.

The problem with PC apps is that they waste precious resources (time, money, hard drive space, memory space)...lots of PC apps try to implement their own chat services (some P2P clients), their own music player and video player (some P2P clients), their own file transfer methods (IM clients), etc...this is WRONG!

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this when other programs do it better than they can? I don't need file transfer in my IM client...why is it even implemented when the IM program could simply call an FTP app do download a file...redundant features waste my hard drive space and my memory space, and they waste precious development time that could be spent making the program better at what it's supposed to do.

Really...I'd much rather see something like iCal, Address Book and Mail than an all-in-one-supposed-solution such as Entourage.

If you're not interested in calendaring, too bad for you, you're stuck with it with Entourage. You don't need to use it but it's still loaded when you launch Entourage, it's still wasting your HD space, it's still hogging memory space. If you prefer another calendaring app to Entourage's, tough luck, Entourage won't play well with other calendaring apps.

Modular apps such as Mail, iCal, and Address Book combined with good communication between them and the fact that other apps can use these apps individually to fit their needs is a godsend.

Remember kids, feature redundancy is bloat. Say NO to bloat (and drugs.)

I'd rather have one program using a good chunk of memory, than ten programs using alot more memory and HD space... But thats just me I guess. Funny how every PC program is **** to you guy's even if they are far superior to any other.

Chris

Guy Incognito · 01:20 PM

Originally posted by kmkkid:

I'd rather have one program using a good chunk of memory, than ten programs using alot more memory and HD space... But thats just me I guess. Funny how every PC program is **** to you guy's even if they are far superior to any other.

Chris

Actually you'd have 10 programs with different implementations of the same feature. And they'd have a hell of a time intercommunicating with each other which means you'd have 3 different address books databases, 4 different spellcheckers each using their own dictionaries, 2 different media players, 6 different instant-messaging systems, 3 different mailing programs and 5 different internet search tools.

If that's superiority to you...then so be it.

The modular approach is clearly superior as other apps can start making use of individual features that are part of a global system.

Justin W. Williams · Oct 17, 2002, 01:57 PM

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
I'm just one person, but I'm tired of seeing all this CRAP included with IM. I can understand simple file transfers, but now they are tryign to get into video and photo crap... IM stands for instant message, not instant movie or file transfer, etc...

I just want catagories in iChat...

I'd love to have Videoconferencing Capabilities in iChat. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Technicolor · Oct 17, 2002, 03:09 PM

I'd just like the same feature set that's already available in official, company sanctioned, application. If AOL Instant Messenger supports buddy icons and file transfer then it would be nice to also have that feature set in an application whose usability and appearance I prefer (Proteus).

I just can't figure out why Trillian can do it, but nobody else can. I feel handicapped not having the full feature set available to me. Even if I don't use said features that often I want these Mac apps to be as good or better than their PC counterparts...and they should be!

Guy Incognito · Oct 17, 2002, 03:31 PM

Originally posted by Technicolor:

I just can't figure out why Trillian can do it, but nobody else can.

Maybe they've written their own library which they've reverse engineered and ain't sharing with the open-source community.

I don't know how many people work on Trillian but for the longest time AOL was fighting to stop Trillian's efforts on reverese-engineering their protocol. Apparently AOL's given up...so now they no longer need to reverse-engineer.

Trillian can either share this library or simply keep their hard-efforts for themselves and let others try to figure it out.

Not everyone has the time to reverse-engineer other people's work...especially not University students such as Proteus' Justin, part of a 1-man team.

Correct me if I'm wrong but there's a lot of people working on Fire, the very open-source multi-IM client, they're efforts should be able to reverse-engineer AIM's oscar protocol.

The Adium author might be able to clarify things up...I'm not sure if what I'm saying makes any sense.

Mulattabianca · Oct 17, 2002, 10:31 PM

... trillian crap?
no, i used that when i used windows... instead of all those 100 single messengers.
and it still has some features that i can find in fire (no, im not going to use proteus).

id like to be not on the same availability in all means. so invisible in some, busy or invisible in other.

file transfer serves me the nerves.. i dont want them. use email.

id like to bring the icons i want.. also for the buddies. not those horrible icons.. aol looks ugly and rhe current icq makes me vomit, ugly.

.. i'm missing a lot of features still in those of mac. ichat.. well yea. not for all my means = no. prtreus not.. and there arent other then.

Millennium · Oct 17, 2002, 11:07 PM

To explain the Trillian thing...

AIM actually has two protocols, that is, there are two different ways a program can connect to the AIM system.

AIM and iChat use OSCAR (I forget what it stands for). This is actually the official AOL network protocol, and it can handle a great many things besides AIM. However, until iChat came along, only AOL was allowed to use it. Apple signed a deal with AOL, after which Apple could use it too.

AOL has another protocol, however, called TOC (Talk to OsCar). Anyone can use this protocol, and many AIM clients do. However, it is crippled in comparison to OSCAR. In particular, you cannot do file transfers. This is actually a very important thing to be missing, because things like buddy icons are overlaid on top of OSCAR's file-transfer mechanism. If you can't transfer files, you can't do buddy icons.

Most of the multi-client IM apps you see out there use TOC. Why? Two reasons. One, it's an open protocol, so you can go and get the specs; this makes it fairly easy to implement. Two, AOL doesn't care if you use it.

Trillian, for its part, reverse-engineered OSCAR. This allows it to support more of AOL's features. However, this comes at a price: AOL is constantly attempting to block Trillian and all other OSCAR-using clients, except for its own (and, now, iChat). Once they block a client, your only course of action is to upgrade the client, and before you do that, the Trillian folks have to re-reverse-engineer the blocking mechanism.

So there's a price to pay for Trillian's extra features: you'll be fighting spotty service and constant upgrades. The multi-IM clients on the Mac have decided that this isn't a worthwhile battle, and so they stick with TOC. It's a tradeoff: features or reliability? You make the call.

Millennium · Oct 17, 2002, 11:12 PM

One other thing to note, for those would-be iChat-piggybackers: iChat's OSCAR support appears to be compiled directly into the app, and is not put out into separate libraries. So I'm afraid it's probably not possible to "borrow" iChat's libraries to make an OSCAR client.

What might work, though, would be to use the libraries from Netscape 7. The networking libraries are native-code, and can be linked to any application (the same libraries are used in the "official" AIM client). However, being a Carbon app, you can't just use classdump to get the API all nice and neat; reverse-engineering the libraries would take a fair bit of work.

resImadA · Oct 17, 2002, 11:26 PM

The biggest obstacle in accessing the official AIM server (like Trillian and Gaim) is the challenge packets that the AIM server sends.

Shortly after sign on (and I believe periodically after that), the AIM server asks the client for a portion of its memory at a specified offset. The client needs to understand this command, find the memory it wants, encrypt it with the correct key, and send it back to the server.

If anything is done incorrectly, or the memory doesn't match a known AIM-client (specifically the AIM client that you're pretending to be), the server will disconnect.

I'm not sure how Trillian manages this (closed source), but I have checked out Gaim, and they've apparently built a database of every challenge key the server will ask for, and the appropriate response. When challenged, the Gaim client requests this information from the gaim.sourceforge.net server (where the database is stored), and then sends the result to AIM.

Why can't Adium/Proteus/Fire do this?
Millennium hit the nail on the head:
"AOL doesn't care if you use it"

It's simply not worth the effort (battling AOL for connectivity) for some arguably unimportant features. All the necessary bits are available on TOC, and AOL doesn't appear to mind us playing there.

plot twist · Oct 18, 2002, 12:46 AM

Originally posted by Millennium:
One other thing to note, for those would-be iChat-piggybackers: iChat's OSCAR support appears to be compiled directly into the app, and is not put out into separate libraries. So I'm afraid it's probably not possible to "borrow" iChat's libraries to make an OSCAR client.

not from what i've heard....

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/InstantMessage.framework

Technicolor · Oct 18, 2002, 12:57 AM

So there's a price to pay for Trillian's extra features: you'll be fighting spotty service and constant upgrades. The multi-IM clients on the Mac have decided that this isn't a worthwhile battle, and so they stick with TOC. It's a tradeoff: features or reliability? You make the call.

I thought that was the case several months ago. I haven't heard of AOL blocking them since. That was kind of the reason why I was so curious. I was hoping maybe AOL had given up. Not bloody likely though is it?