On Saturday night my time (about 4am Trillian time) build 75 of Astra hit the interweb with a sigh of relief from all the Astra alpha testers who had gone without a new build for a few weeks!

New in this build was the “last” of the official features to be added: Video support!

I managed to grab my copy just as it was released and immediately bugged Kevin Kurtz (kwk, one of the 2 head developers and owners at Cerulean Studios) and asked if I could try out the video chat functionality with him! (I thought it would be polite to ask, seeing as it was 4am at his end!)

So after opening up a chat window and finding the Video chat button, I hit the button to see what happened! Kevin wasn’t particularly confident that it would be flawless (long distance!), but I was!

Next thing I know I have a black window and a figure started to appear - there was Kevin in all his “other side of the world at 4am” glory! It worked well, extremely well actually! Video and audio syncing was perfect, and the frame rate was quite smooth. We were both impressed and only at one point did the audio go slightly scratchy, but that soon cleared up and it ran smoothly. Success!

After letting Kevin go (he had to drive home from the office yet, and being a father of some youngens, would mostly likely be up again in a few hours), I had a bit of a quick look at the other changes.

  • The new splash screen. Not a major feature or really even a minor one, but a sign we’re moving towards a beta release when things start to get some polish added.
  • Medium connection status alerts. If a medium decides to boot you or drops out, you will get a little message popup in the contact list saying that the medium had disconnected with a “Reconnect” button. My question here is - is this needed? If you’ve been disconnected (and you were connected beforehand) then chances are you do want to reconnect. I haven’t looked into it much yet, but why not just automatically reconnect? Maybe it has tried a certain amount of times already? If so, maybe initiate a timer and try again later? Maybe it does all this already, and it’s just my short experience with this that is the problem. :) Either way, I will check with the CS guys.
  • Connect option available directly from the iconholder. A tiny option that’s heaps handy for me. I never autoconnect to any mediums when I run Astra (comes from when I am skinning, if I make it crash I don’t want to be continually reconnecting to all the mediums). So for me to connect to my other mediums (prior to build 75) I would have to go into the preferences section, then into the connections and manually select each medium and tell it to connect. Now I can just click the orb in the iconholder and tell it to connect. Simple, but useful. :)
  • User is offline alert now pops up if a person you are talking to goes offline while chatting to them. I’m not 100% sure here, but I had this appear for me, but the user then came online shortly afterwards. The alert was still showing though - again another one I have to check out to see if it’s just my short usage missing something!

So how has the reception been for this build? Well, good and bad. Good because it’s great to see video finally re-added to the app and all the other little features. Bad because there appears to be an issue for some people when they upgrade to this build where it kills your contacts and connection info! Personally I had no problems with the upgrade whatsoever. However a friend of mine lost everything (as have quite a few other people out there). There are some hints and tips on how to fix the issue (delete connecion .ini files) but it’s definitely a bug that will need fixing!

Another question that is now being posed is, with the video support, it’s currently in for only the Astra protocol, what about the others? Both Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are quite popular out there, so will we see support for the other mediums?

I asked Scott (smw) just after my video test with Kevin, and he wasn’t totally committing to the idea, but said they would keep an eye on things and make a decision on it. Chances are there will be a lot of call for it!

So overall quite a positive release (featurewise) just not so positive on the “break everything” bug for some people! From a skinning point of view, it’s yet another item that needs to be skinned (coz there’s such a lack of things that need skinning, lol), but it looks like it’s the last big “add” and so, most likely the last big new things that needs skinning!

Update: As of this morning when I woke up, Astra was telling me that there was a new build available to grab, so I let it update while I took a shower and came back to build 76. CS fixed the major-breaker problem, so there were a whole lot of happier people out there.