Skype Blog: Skype for Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

Skype Blog: Skype for Windows 8

blogs.skype.com

17 pointskefs21 comments

"Always On" frightens me. Receiving a Skype call these days involves answering it on my laptop, then finding and silencing all my iPads and other mobile devices that continue to ring at me obnoxiously. "Hang on a second while I... [hop hop hop on one foot while headphoned to the laptop and slowly dragging it off the table while trying to grab that backpack in the corner witn my toes]... Got it. Anyway, what were you saying?"

The iOS version of Skype has no "quit" option at all. If you ever open it for any reason, it'll dingle at you incessantly from there on out until you hard reboot the device. It's my current top annoyance with Skype.

So when they start announcing that annoyance as the big feature of their new version, it doesn't exactly get me excited to try it.

Yeah, my friends love the constant ONLINE! OFFLINE! ONLINE! OFFLINE! When I go in and out of wifi range on my iPhone. Have had to set it to appear offline...

> The iOS version of Skype has no "quit" option at all.

Double-press the iPhone button, find Skype icon, tap and hold until it stars to wobble, tap (x). Or am I missing something?

That's a terrible user experience, especially for something that could be a setting.

It is a setting, but it is in the "Settings" app - not inside the app.

The iOS app also drains my battery by being always on. It was so irritating I deleted it entirely.

There is a "sign out" option in iOS skype which does what you're after.

http://i.imgur.com/uOn3Q.png

> The iOS version of Skype has no "quit" option at all.

You're lucky that you regularly receive calls. It seems that Skype grabs a few MB of memory when in the background, which made a big difference on my iPad 1. Suddenly people who have OCD about their iOS multitasking dock don't seem paranoid anymore...

Now we see Microsoft's marketing department, always these smiling, good looking, ethnic diverse, people with too perfect illumination and image coloring. There is one guy at Microsoft who thinks this is the only way of making pictures.

It always looks so artificial and impersonal. Also kinda boring. Nokia is worse, it's similar but only people in their twenties and "hip".

I have Windows 8 (desktop). I cannot express enough how much I DON'T want that version of Skype.

If Skype force me to use their "app" version then I will literally stop using Skype entirely.

I also don't want to be "always on." In fact things like Google's Circles where I can select with greater granularity who I am "on" for is my number one request for Skype. At the moment I am forced to have two Skype accounts, one for home, and one for work for that reason.

Do you like Windows 8 so far? Why did you switch? I tried the Release Candidate for like 10 minutes, but hated it so much I deleted the VM it was running in immediately afterwards.

I switched to Windows 8 because I wanted to familiarise myself with it for its eventual launch. It is my opinion that you cannot have a valid opinion on something (good or bad) unless you've given it a fair shot. I am running the RTM (retail) version released on MSDN/Technet+/Volume Licences/et al.

I've ran it for about a month and while Windows Explorer is a big step forwards, everything related to the "Modern" UI (Metro) is a big step backwards. The apps are poor, the finish is poor, and the intuition is non-existent.

The whole thing feels like an unfinished product. It is like they released it mid-production and thus ideas are only half baked. For just one example, the old-fashioned Control Panel is still used to configure 75%+ of the system but yet getting to it is now buried.

Originally I was going to recommend you get W8 if you had a touch device, but given how badly Modern UI is currently performing I am instead recommending getting either an iPad or an Android Tablet. Both of which will give a better user experience.

The biggest issue I would say is not the design/concepts but instead just how poorly they have been carried out, how rushed, and how messy.

Imagine for a second that Apple's development philosophy was 70% features and then 30% polish. Now imagine that Microsoft's previous development philosophy was 85% features and then 15% polish. Well on this same scale Windows 8 would be 99% features 1% polish (with a rounding error of 1%).

Look at the 2 fake comment at the blog page :)

"I love metro version of Skype!"

I doubt that, "metro" is used. This is so funny, it was actually a good brand for the new interface. Now they try it with Windows 8....

This is even worse than the Mac version of Skype (though many users complained about the inability to fully customize the contactlist column-size, e.g. for seeing the full name of the contacts instead of the meaningless status-column, nothing happened).

Why are all of the images 1,680px × 1,050px then scaled down in the image tag?

Also, every version of Skype I use gets progressively worse. Facebook integration! Status updates from your friends! We moved feature A to menu B. Just make my calls not fucking suck.

They are 1,366x768 resized to 600x350 for me, which I guess could ha started as a retina thing.

It would indeed be hilarious if Microsoft mangled web-standards to comply with Apple's broken non-standard additions.

The circle of incompetence would be complete.

This is not a Windows blog, it's a Skype one. I find it entirely plausible that someone on their web team has been sold on resizing to 50% in the browser, which is one suggested way to engage Apple's spare pixels.

edit: Also, even if it were a Microsoft blog, I still wouldn't consider it an impossibility. There are devices running Windows Phone with Retina-comparable pixel densities, so Microsoft must have considered taking advantage of the super-resolution capabilities in a compatible manner. I don't know if they have done so, but it would be silly if they didn't use any of that spare hardware capability.

Given that the Windows 8 version is a complete UI rewrite (it has to be) there isn't much to make worse, I guess :-)

Sick of seeing video conferencing using SUPER HD IMAGES to show the broadcasting. I doubt it even looks that good in lab conditions.

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