Give us a better Skype 5 for Mac!

Skype 5 beta for mac is available for some weeks now. “Beta” means “not final”, but this won’t put all users minds at ease. Unfunctional, inefficient and badly designed are many of the features and UI elements of the chat/voip/messenger client. Our petition to Skype: make it a better Skype 5 for Mac! Our plea to the public: support our petition!

(Skype 5 für Mac – Petition auf Deutsch) Update: Skype called and promised improvements!

No doubt about it: many new features of the upcoming Skype 5 for Mac are fine – and the choise to use them is left to the user. Group videochats, better contact administration, connection to the adress book – great, we like this on our macs. Stability: fine, especially for a beta version. The problem: its impossible to work with the new client. The conformation of Skypes’ Mac- and Windows-versions did not bring any improvement to the Mac client but the opposite. Our position: Yes to new features – but please keep the useability of the mac OS X client. Give us a better Skype 5 for Mac!

After its release, we tested Skype 5 Beta for mac – a more than disappointing experioence. Scrolling orgys caused by the enormous amount of space each message consumes, quickly lost focus on conversations and lacking overview due to the vanished option to sort chats and conversations left but little hope that the redesigned version for Mac OS X will succeed.

Text size and -spacing – it needs some goodwill to recognize them als “features” – the space consumption of skype 5 for Mac clearly lost its balance between useability and textsize.

Drag and Drop: This was a great feature and is painfully missed on many cases now. Arrange your chats and conversations in the sidebar? Impossible – the default is sorted by age and thats good enough for you. Dragging contacts into a chat? Same here, invite only now. Two highly intuitiove functions badly subsituted. Not yet implemented or an adaption of the “Windows Style” Skype? We hope its not the latter, for useability comes with intuitive functions, not with graphical gimmicks like Cover Flow for contacts (nice, but mostly useless).

Focus and Keyboard Shortcuts. Being unable to switch conversations fast and to continue typing is an ergonomic nightmare. If there are keyboard shortcuts for that: we did not find them,. Speaking of shortcuts: on the mac, there was a shortcut (CMD- >) to switch between conversation and searchbox. Its gone in the beta – but there are more guys than ustr us searching for a contact while typing and enjoying the quick switch without having to use the mouse.

You also do need your mouse for scrolling (and you will scroll a lot in Skype 5) because the Tab-Switch between history and input is gone. No more Tab – PageUp/Down – quicklook at your recent conversation, but why?

For the sake of completeness: Showing Downloads/Data transfers as inline messages in the accurding chat is ok. To kill the separate “transferred files”-window isn’t. Furthermore, the “single window”-philosophy of Skype 5 is simply gratuitous – any good reaasons for it apart the “the windows version looks this way too”? Separate conversation-, contact- and transfer windows are useful not only while using multiple displays. Nevertheless, even skype 5 has separate windows – those HUD-styled VoIP-windows do in fact show that its possible – but again, for the wrong (or too less) causes.

There are some more missed opportunities to create a “better Skype 5 for Mac” – everyone is invited to get an impression on his/her own. Just drag your Skype.app to a safe place before you download and install Skype 5 beta. In case you dislike the upcoming new mac version, just drag your old skype.app back into the programs folder. Settings, history etc. stay intact. One of the few good things to say on Skype 5 Beta for Mac OS X.

Conclusion: Thats a major drawback. Skype, please: change this. Everyone else, please: support us.

A Better Skype 5 for Mac – Kampagnenseite (english)
A Better Skype 5 for Mac – Kampagnenseite (german)