For a couple of years, I’ve used Trillian for my instant messaging client. I’ve stopped recently, though, because of problems with Trillian. I wrote a longer post about this on my personal blog last month, but basically, my two big complaints are that Trillian doesn’t support the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) on Tablet PC’s, and there’s no support for MSN Alerts. Even the new release of Trillian 3 doesn’t support TIP or MSN Alerts, and there’s no indication I could find as to when, if ever, it will.

Because of the lack of MSN Alerts support with Trillian, I’ve been using MSN Messenger for the last few months, and recently started using the beta. And I’ve been really happy with it. But most of my friends are using AOL Instant Messenger, so for that, I switched to AOL’s AIM client.

AIM does support TIP, so at least I can use it on my Tablet PC in slate mode. But much of the UI is rather frustrating. The most annoying thing it does is pop the Buddy List and ‘AIM Today’ windows to the front whenever I sign in. This means that I open my laptop, start using it, and a couple of minutes later, when it decides to notice that I have a network connection, I suddenly get these two extra windows popping up. I’d love to find out how to get rid of that feature.

Two features I miss from Trillian:

• The ability to rename contacts. I have a hard time remembering who owns the screen name “koswrgex793”. With Trillian, I could rename the contact to something easier (say, “Bob”).
• Logging. Trillian could log conversations; I’ve found no way to do it with AIM. I found a few references to logging programs for AIM on Google, but most of what I found indicated that it was for earlier versions of AIM and was no longer compatible. On the other hand, I remember hearing that Google’s desktop search tool could search AIM conversation logs, so it seems like there must be some way to do this. Maybe I’m just missing something.