S K Y P E

[tobyaw]

Just upgraded to the newly-released Skype 5.0 on my Mac. Previous version was 2.8, which is quite a leap in version numbering. First impression is that the user interface has enlarged — the one-window interface is much larger than the previous slimline offering, and everything seems to be separated by loads of white space. Maybe I’ll get used to it. Or maybe they’ll fix it.

Comments

how to fix the whitespace...

[(Anonymous)]

I fixed this a while backby using this...

http://pongsocket.com/experiments/skype5mini

[marcus bointon (from livejournal.com)]

It's dire! The beta was way worse, and absolutely huge! Skype's main claim for the new UI is that it's more like the Windows version, as if that's a good thing. As you say it's got bigger, but also less flexible, more inconvenient, more confusing and has lost quite a few features that were in 2.8. It's getting an awful lot of bad reviews. Apart from group video (which isn't free and of no real interest to me) and address book integration, it's a big step backwards.

[ggreig]

Of course it's a good thing :-) - except that they've changed the Windows version to make it frustrating too...

Just saying, Skype is your problem, not Windows.

[tobyaw]

I'm not happy about the Windows version either, but somehow the new Mac one, while looking similar, feels even worse. Maybe its the scale of the change - the old version was quite compact. Or maybe it's because on the Mac I tend to have my chat clients in a thin column to the right of my programme windows, whereas in Windows I run most of my programmes full screen.

The width of the Skype window is the problem, not the height.

[marcus bointon (from livejournal.com)]

The size is the obvious thing, but that's at least partially fixable with chat styles (they've announced a competition to make them, thus admitting that theirs is rubbish!). It's the functional changes that are most annoying - history has gone, it now gets mixed in wih calls, chats etc, so you can't distinguish a birthday reminder from a call, and because of this new temporal arrangement, it's forever moving chats around. I usually have about 30 open, and I'm always losing them and having to go through deleting history items mixed up with them. 2.8's simple spatial list was just fine. If you have lots of people in a chat (one of mine has 40), it now makes this massive header to fit them all in. 2.8 hid them behind a neat disclosure triangle. They also dropped the ability to screen share a selection; it now only does whole screens. The new contact palette is bigger than the old one, but does less, and the full contact view is just massive. Oddly, the new dial pad is tiny. You can't break out video windows, so they restrict chat space. It goes on.