Trillian Astra: Remove the chat banner “ads”

We told you on Friday about the new IM client Trillian Astra.  Well, it’s only been a couple days but it is fast becoming my instant messaging client of choice.  The interface is great and you can plug into nearly every other messaging service out there.  One thing that was bothering me, however, were the banner “ads” at the top of every chat window (see the image above, the red box denotes what I’m talking about).  As it turns out they are not really ads but simply RSS items displayed in the same way Gmail can show an RSS feed ticker above your inbox.  I didn’t like it in Gmail, I don’t like it in Trillian.

After some digging I discovered how to get rid of this annoying space waster.  The feature is actually called a Knowledge Bar.  You can get to it by following: Preferences>Chat>Instant Lookup.  This will open an options window (see image below) and under the Knowledge Bar section simply highlight each entry and delete them with the big red “X” to the right.  When no items are listed the banner at the top of your dialogue boxes will disappear for good.

The other item in this same option window is something called Instant Lookup.  By default Wikipedia is listed and provides a pretty cool feature.  With this enabled certain words in your conversation will be underlined; simply mouse over them and you’ll be presented with a balloon window containing the Wikipedia definition of the designated word.  Move the mouse and the balloon disappears.  I’m not sure what other items you can add to this as of yet, but this feature is far more useful then the Knowledge Bar is.

One small note.  As I recently updated to the latest release, which includes a 30 day trial of Trillian Pro, I’m not sure if you can do this in the free version.  As such, we’ll see what happens when my 30 days runs out and if the RSS items do in fact return.