Astra, the upcoming sequel to what was once everyone’s favorite universal messenger, is currently undergoing closed testing within Cerulean Studios. But that’s changing. Development of the app has reached the alpha state, and signups are now open for anyone wanting to get a chance to help Cerulean test Astra into submission. Approved testers will of course have to be involved in the testing community and submit their bugs to cerulean, this isn’t just a preview of some new software.

Read more: Trillian Astra alpha-testing signups

Windows users who want to be a little more like Mac users will soon have another application to install. Swift is a new web-browser currently in an alpha state (ie. don’t expect solid performance or stability) and is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which also powers many of Mac OS X’s hottest applications, Dashboard, Safari, Shiira, Adium Messenger and BBEdit to name a few. Development is currently well underway on Swift and the codebase is open source, so you developers get on over there and contribute some code to make Windows user’s lives a better place!

Read more: Swift browser for Windows