Skype for Mac 5.0 beta released | Hacker News Reader

Skype for Mac 5.0 beta released

skype.com

48 pointsjipumarino39 comments

Yikes. What I liked about the previous version of skype was the relatively streamlined real estate. This version looks like a suburban mini mansion. On my macbook the new layout takes up half of the screen. Normally this would not be a problem if you can actually change the settings, font size, styling, or something. Haven't found out how to do that yet.

Rule of thumb for designers: Whitespace is your friend. But using it doesn't guarantee that your interface will be better.

Oh, I found "make text smaller" under view. But this is context sensitive and not global. So now I have different conversations with different sized font. Who is designing this product?

And then you get tiny text with tons of whitespace around it...

There is an option for style, currently set to 'Panamericana', but I've had no luck finding any other styles online.

I created one for the old Skype for mac: http://edds.github.com/Simples.SkypeChatStyle

I will be converting this to the new Skype at some point over the next week. The styles are full HTML, CSS and JS. The messages are all placed into the view with JS so its fairly easy to customise to your hearts content.

I really think they got the right idea by making it look more "mac" window/finder like....

But they totally missed the mark by putting so much white space and padding around everything.

The minimal size I can shrink the window to is still >=33% of my 20" monitor, even with "Compact Sidebar" and smaller font.

They really should have studied the Mac OS user interface a bit more before releasing this. It seems like they fell into the whole lots of white-space and big font web-design trends...

I think they new interface isn't the "online contacts" sidebar anymore, they've got a separate HUD view for that now (sidebar -> small icon next to "CONTACTS"). If you use that for starting conversations and hide the main window, it's actually somewhat usable. Would be better if there were an option to hide the silly avatar pictures there, too.

Edit: Just noticed that the HUD window is always on top. Dang. Let's see if that Adium plugin is still in development…

+group chat

-cpu still an issue -new groups ordering is somewhat confusing. i don't want a ridiculously big window listing all my online contacts with WAY to much whitespace around. i want my groups :( -hud contact list is always on top, that is seriously annoying -the hud window gives no feedback/options to me (except double clicking, which opens the other BIG window with the chat) -the cover flow contact list is just.. and the list goes on

Can anyone take a screen shot and upload it to imgr/etc?

After reading this, I don't dare install it before seeing it...

This is how it appeared for me straight after installing and closing the welcome dialog:

http://imgur.com/3e8kv.png

Thank you!

It looks like the iTunes of video communication. And I really don't want that.

Horrible! Completely agree: this window can't be resized below 400 pixels wide. Crazy. I used to have the skype contacts as a long column on the right of my screen (less than 100px width).

They do have an option to sort of still do that, but it's a floating window that appears in front of everything else, with very high transparency.

Frankly, if I could revert to the previous version with one click, I'd do it instantly.

Windows: 5.0, Mac: 5.0, Linux: 2.1

I understand putting Mac and Windows versions before Linux versions, but a 3 version difference is starting to get ridiculous. Skype for Linux 2.1 is perfectly usable (apart from sometimes forgetting all settings), but getting it up to the level of it's cross-platform brothers would be nice. Skype has been teasing "something" for Linux for like a year now, so I wonder what happened to that.

Yesterday the mac version was 2.8, so I think that's a bit of hyperbole.

Version number aside, the difference in the offered functionality between mac 2.8 and linux 2.1 was considerable as well. I was merely using the version numbers to point out the difference in offered functionality.

I actually like the simplicity of the Linux 2.1 client a lot.

I use version 3 (I think, maybe 4?) on Windows because I find the old interface a lot more usable than the 5.0 one.

It's not quite a 1:1 correspondence. For example, high quality video came to Linux somewhere in 2.x, when Windows got it in 4.0. That said, I believe it took about a year to get it on Linux after Windows.

As far as I can tell, Skype for Linux has all of the same core features as the other clients. The only things it is missing, which were missing in the Mac version AFAIK before this beta, were gaming and the ability to take pictures of the conversation. Although the snapshot ability would be nice, I greatly prefer the Linux interface to the clunky Windows one. I use Skype as my main IM client and video conference several hours a week, all under Linux..

Coverflow for your contacts seems a bit superfluous.

Nice, but I've had consistently bad experiences with calls on Skype. Over the years (including at the current time) I constantly get situations where Skype's connection freezes or drops or the audio becomes unacceptable.

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/if-only-skype-worked.html

Ironically I use skype at home (very painlessly) for most of my calls since AT&T's coverage for my cell is way, way worse. YMMV of course.

This was very uncomfortable to use. It does not feel right, it looks like a poor knock off of Finder, it immediately interrupted my work-flow and sat uncomfortably on my screen (24" on spaces and a 22" secondary; I am not short on screen space).

I reinstalled the old version after about 30 minutes of use. Horrible.

Group video chat!

One less reason to use iChat. Phew.

Yes, but it sounds like they're planning on charging for it!

Start your _free trial_ for group video calling beta

_one-to-one_ video calls and instant messaging are free

I just scoured the internet to find out about pricing. Nada. Apparently the media covering this new feature didn't think their readers would care about this enough to even add "No word on pricing yet"

I'd imagine Skype is probably surveying beta users on a fair price.

Warning: excessive whitespace abounds.

I wish they would rather solve the ridiculous memory footprint of skype in windows. The other day it had 300M private bytes

I wish they would work on their linux client too

Without Canadian Skype in phone numbers, this still isn't a must-need application for 33 million folks.

Seriously? Of the 33 million Canadians: How many know what Skype is. Of those that do, how many know what a Skype-in number is? Of those, how many care if they have a Skype-in number?

Admittedly, the number is pulled out of a hat, but I would guess maybe 5000 Canadians.

We're very advanced people :)

Ok - sure, you're right - 33 million is a bit drastic... however, consider this:

In 2009, 74.9% of Canada's population had access to the Internet. Our population is spread out across the second largest land mass in the world. Our local laws (and the evil CRTC) allow telecom monopolies to exist and maintain exceptionally high monthly rates. In some parts of our otherwise great nation, calling across the street incurs long distance charges.

VoIP let a lone a service with all of Skype's features could make a very serious impact.

With these things in mind 33 million may be a stretch... but the potential number of Skype In users far exceeds 5000.

I think part of the reason Skype hasn't done Skype In for Canada is due to some of the requirements the CRTC puts on telecoms here (there's some rigmarole to do with 911 and municipal taxes). I'm guessing the regulatory hassles aren't quite worth it yet for them.

It is too bad they don't have it though. I would have preferred Skype In over Vonage when I was looking for a home phone a few years ago.

I find it hard to support a closed communications system like Skype that makes it impossible for third parties to develop client applications. I also don't trust the encryption since it's all closed.

If only they would solve the CPU hog problem... I open one Skype video chat and the MBP gets hot, fans start to work at full speed, etc. That doesn't happen on my Windows laptops.

I'm hoping a later revision has more "View" options. The whitespace and general padding on the contacts as well as the chats is pretty bad.

I have no idea what the Windows version looks like but the Mac version looks like crap. Why is it taking up half my screen?

Is it possible to make video full–screen in this version of Skype? I can’t for the life of me figure out how.

H.323 baby!

One word: AVOID

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