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

Several years ago, Trillian was the end all be all for Windows messengers. Not the first, but certainly one of the most stylish and attractive universal messengers, Trillian was an instant web-success. Then things started to go wrong. Development was split into a free version and a pro (commercial) version. Both started getting bloated and performance suffered. But, Trillian appears to be making a comeback. With the newest version, Astra, Cerulean Studios are attacking the performance issues by updating the rendering times as well as chasing down the many memory leaks that have been plaguing them for years now. Many new enhancements are coming, including a widget system, support for MySpace Messenger, and many other new features. But enough blah blah blah, go take a look and see if you’re willing to give old faithful another shot.

Read more: Cerulean Studios offers preview of Astra

Google today announced that their Gmail mobile client has gone live! The Gmail mobile client is designed to be as powerful as the web client, allowing users to search their email, easily navigate and compose mail with the minimal of clicks and even allows users to click and call contacts stored in your Gmail contacts list. The client is JAVA-based and runs on hundreds of JAVA-enabled mobile devices already.

Read more: Gmail mobile client goes live

I’m not only saying this because I’m on a Mac. I used to hate Firefox under OS X, but, I have to say, Firefox 2 is looking and feeling quite right. Firefox 2.0 is now available and trust me, you should be using it (in case you already aren’t). With IE 7 proving to be a royal pain in the ass (uhh, security warnings when trying to open notepad.exe? why?) and Windows Vista proving to be an ugly mess, there’s no reason to stick with Internet Explorer for browsing the internet.

Read more: Mozilla Firefox

David Watanabe, the creator of the great NewsFire RSS reader has done it again (and again) with his brand new torrent client, Xtorrent. This man definitely knows how to design a piece of a software. The user interface is elegant and simple, with the multi-source searching a breath of fresh air compared to searching the dredges of the internet trying to find a torrent file. I’m sure David will keep up the great work, but he’s already won me over, Xtorrent is already my torrent client of choice for OS X, not that I’d use such an evil and illegal technology.

Read more: Xtorrent

Brian Eno has long been a pioneer in audio and visual arts. The father of ambient music, Eno’s career spans decades and his technical and artistic achievements are rivaled by very few. Eno’s recent project, “77 Million Paintings” is an experiment in digital art, featuring 3GB or actually, 77 million paintings, on one DVD. The project is full of brilliant pieces (many millions of them) of art and a generative soundtrack produced by the man himself. The generative soundtrack, which goes along well with the “ambient-Eno” many know and love, are random sounds collected and randomly played back throughout the slideshow, making the soundtrack completely unique with every viewing. “77 Million Paintings” is available now and limited to 10,000 copies, for both PC and MAC.

Read more: 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno | Buy 77 Million Paintings @ Insound

Eudora, the venerable email client for Windows and Mac OS X, will be partnering with Mozilla and going open source according to an announcement by parent company Qualcomm. The new Eudora will be based on the Thunderbird platform keeping all of it’s features and of course, will be free to the public. Along with the announcement today, Eudora also released it’s final commercial version, available for a discounted price, though I don’t know who would want to buy now, nor who would still use Eudora over Thunderbird anyways.

Read more: Ars Technica

MacLibre is a nifty little open source application for Mac OS X, developed at Google’s recent Summer of Code. Consider MacLibre to be the quality control of open source Mac apps, providing Mac users with a pre-selected list of applications available for quick and easy downloading through the use of MacLibre’s internal bittorrent client. More open source applications are being added quite often, naturally after passing MacLibre’s vigorous testing and quality assurance requirements.

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Business travelers and consultants have been fans of portable apps for ages, rightfully so. Portable applications are computer programs that are small enough to fit on portable devices (USB thumb drives for example) and able to be launched from almost any (Windows in this case) computer without leaving your personal data behind. Carry your email, web broswer, calender and address book in the palm of your hand and never worry about having to use someone else’s computer to work with your data. Portableapps.com offers many portable versions of today’s hottest software, from Firefox portable to GIMP portable, allowing you to slim down your computing life and never worry about your private data being left behind anywhere (just don’t forget your USB stick in that internet cafe).

Read more: Portable Apps

The blogosphere is in a whirl as Mozilla approaches their 2.0 release of Firefox, which is continuing Mozilla’s focus on the individual user, web functionality and usability. So naturally there was a lot of chatter yesterday with the announcement that Firefox 2.0 beta 2 was available for public testing (see the download link below). A noticable step forward from beta 1, Some of the enhancements in beta 2 include an updated default theme, search engine manager, keyword suggestions in the search box, and major enhancements to RSS handling, extensions management, security and (supposedly) performance. Naturally this is just a beta release for testing purposes only, so don’t expect any sort of stability, usability or for your old extensions to work. Though there is a utility called the Nightly Tester Tool which will make some of your extensions 2.0 compatible. Happy testing all.

Read more: Firefox 2 project wiki | Mozilla Firefox 2.0 beta 2 download