Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support

I’ve already gushed about Digsby as a potential killer for Trillian’s perpetually delayed Astra release, and now it’s open for everyone to try in public beta. Since I’ve initially written about the IM/email/social network aggregator they’ve updated constantly mostly taking care of connection issues and other bug fixes. You can see their progress over at the Digsby blog.

This latest release for public beta adds Twitter support, something which I’m going to take serious advantage of, support for video/voice chat, and an inline spell checker. You can find the rest of the updates for this release here.

Since I’ve started using Digsby I find that the only thing I truly miss from Trillian was the plentiful skins available at Deviant Art and other sites. Digsby advertises skins on their front page, but I suppose that we haven’t seen any yet because the product was hidden away in private beta. Now that it’s out in the open I suspect the skinning community to have a field day.

Unfortunately, judging from the screenshots, it appears that Digsby sticks with a fairly standard UI throughout different skins. Skinning seems only to affect the colors used in the application and the background image on the buddy list. I hope this is something that is improved upon eventually. For now, I’ll enjoy their Adium-styled conversation themes–something which I’ve been dying for on the PC side.

I was hoping that Digsby’s release would spur on the Trillian Folks to bust out with a private or public beta, but alas it’s still languishing in alpha hell. I have nothing but love for those folks, and being a former Trillian user for 7 years, I would totally love it if Astra came out and totally showed these young Digsby whippersnappers a thing or two.

Oh well.