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New Skype Update Is Horrible

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Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#121

Post by jjeaff »

dasil003 wrote: post #111
gerardnll wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nonsense. I don't think there's a reason to do that except to scam users. Any UX-UI Dev / Engineer / Person with common sense knows that users would not understand the process. 180 days and my credit is disabled but I can reactivate it again anytime? what the hell? What I'm not sure of is what happens if you buy credit without reactivating the inactive balance... Does it reactivate the inactive balance or not?…

My wild guess would be that their finance people do not like a monotonically increasing liability on the books. Since some users will never use their credits, this is their way of satisfying the bean counters.

That was my thought. But as far as the bean counters are concerned, they would base it on an aging schedule. Unused credits stop being counted at 100% after x number of months.

But there isn't really any reason to disable them in the software. Especially since they can be reenabled.

Just like if you have fully depreciated an office desk, that doesn't mean you march into that person's office and take it away. Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!

So I think it is an attempt at scraping more money out of their users.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#122

Post by Fezzik »

CSDude wrote: post #7

I have witnessed Skype to go from almost perfect video & chat communicator to absolute crap over almost 10 years, and I feel very sad that it has come to rip off Snapchat. There is no alternative like the old Skype now in the desktop.

It really is astonishing. I remember using Skype around 2004/05 on a horribly crappy Dell laptop and it (Skype) worked flawlessly. It sort of boggles the mind how far in to the ground it has been driven.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#123

Post by _asummers »

owaislone wrote: post #71
crb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's god-awful about Hangouts, and does the new Hangouts Meet make things better? https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...

Hangouts is a good piece of tech and the has a great UX with minimal UI. The only issues with hangouts are that: 1. It is a resource hog. Laptops spit fire when they run hangouts for more than 10 minutes 2. It can be buggy and unreliable. Almost every 3rd hangout meeting, someone on my team is unable to hear others or is unable to use the mic. Fix can range anything between restarting the computer to killing audio pr…

Not to mention that it supports XMPP for person to person, but group chats no longer work, forcing me to use the browser client despite myriad XMPP clients existing. I understand that it's not XMPP expressly, but that was a feature that used to work on GChat that was removed for seemingly no reason.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#124

Post by karrotwaltz »

blibble wrote: post #88
muppetman wrote: post #34

Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.…

skype for business is by far the worst piece of software I've used in the past 5 years things randomly don't work (e.g. video in groups, picture whiteboards in groups), there's an inability to turn off highlights in group messages, and my machine locks up when a voice call comes in (because the skype client is using 4gb of RAM and windows has swapped it out) only the MS group chat software comes close to being that a…

The worst part about "Skype for business" is that it replaced Lync, which was much better IMO. It was simple but effective, and I don't remember having any kind of problem with it

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#125

Post by dinnouti »

pveierland wrote: post #66

My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use. [0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01…

That's the reason I switch to google hangouts for my international calls. Just open the browser and make the call.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#126

Post by Bud »

makecheck wrote: post #110
ravenstine wrote: post #93

It's absolute crap like this which is why I have turned off automatic updates in Google Play. What a terrible feeling it is to merely open an app and, out of seemingly nowhere, a seemingly different app opens up and you can't go back. There's security and all that, but literally screw security if big corps are going to remotely fiddle with my device and turn me into a beta tester. How do you take the original king of…

This is probably going to be a problem that next-generation lawmakers have to solve: how to force entities to distinguish between different types of changes, and be liable for sticking to that set. Just like it’s ridiculous to let installers run as root without a sandbox, it should be considered ridiculous that we can’t constrain updaters: I should be able to say “bug fixes only” or whatever, and see only that happen…

Wait. You actually think that individual consumers should be able to, essentially, construct their own unique snowflake version of an app which only fixes bugs but retains the UI (and god knows what other code) from an arbitrary previous version?

Look, I don't like some of these stupid updates either, but that idea is completely unworkable.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#127

Post by Jach »

jeltz wrote: post #115
Jach wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up with the native clients earlier this year when I could no longer get any to run and log me in. I now use https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype Yeah it's Electron web-shit and it doesn't work with video calls (but there are enough low-friction alternatives now like Hangouts I can insist on should a skype friend really want to video chat) but at least it's no worse than their browser interface and won't…

There is a plugin which adds Skype support to Pidgin which I have yet to try. https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...

I tried it once and it didn't work, didn't realize they had a flow chart though. Maybe I'll try it again in the future. But the other potential issue is that I login with my old MSN credentials (in the native app there used to be a separate 'login with Microsoft account' screen) so that might screw things up too.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#128

Post by Bud »

rubatuga wrote: post #79

Seriously, skype is not a social media platform, so stop trying to make it one Microsoft! Skype is a standard video/voice chat/conferencing that has found its place in everywhere from gaming to professional meetings, so what you’re doing here is diluting your target market.

It's not their target market. They don't care about Skype. That's clear. They bought it to eliminate it as a competitor.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#129

Post by CaveTech »

gerardnll wrote: post #102
pveierland wrote: post #66

My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use. [0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01…

It is nonsense. I don't think there's a reason to do that except to scam users. Any UX-UI Dev / Engineer / Person with common sense knows that users would not understand the process. 180 days and my credit is disabled but I can reactivate it again anytime? what the hell? What I'm not sure of is what happens if you buy credit without reactivating the inactive balance... Does it reactivate the inactive balance or not?…

Having had this happen to me (and not realize it until later), I can say that purhasing new credits keeps your old credits in pergatory.

They neither remind you that "hey, you have credits, dont purchase more!" and they happily spend your new credits to hope none the wiser.

I imagine this was all for doing some creative accounting to pump up their books.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#130

Post by robryan »

scrollaway wrote: post #50
curiousgal wrote: post #43

>If the Skype desktop is made anywhere near as bad, I'm officially going to switch to Discord. Aha, not a Linux user I see.

? Discord works wonderfully well on Linux

Discord makes me think Electron apps are the future. I use it across windows/osx/Linux and ios, works great everywhere
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