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Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

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Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#101

Post by eganist »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #74
kettlecorn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried it on this webpage, and you’re correct! I really dislike behavior like this that is useful to a few people but is far more likely to be encountered accidentally and feel buggy.

I like it and use it all the time and many people I know also use it a lot. It is not as good for text that is most relevant on the bottom (e.g. text messages) but really useful for webpages, etc.. Some apps implement some logic to scroll back up when you tap it again (Apollo comes to mind). The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab…

> The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab is supposed to do something like that) which is the reason many use think an app is buggy after they have tabbed on it accidentally.

Precisely why this behavior should be considered unfriendly. It's not intuitive and is prone to accidents by the vast majority of the target market.

Even just making it a double-tap would make it drastically better, and double-taps are closer to convention as well. Double-click the left or right arrows in an overloaded tab bar in Firefox on desktop, for instance, for it to scroll a full row over.

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#102

Post by alkonaut »

lev99 wrote: post #82
alkonaut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason having the (non business) Skype is not hard to sell in a big "old school" enterprise, because it's microsoft. I'd have a much harder time selling Discord because of how they market themselves. They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success. Other than that my only complaint is that it's a bit electron-y.

If your in a position where you could convince an organization to use Discord for Business you could probably convince them to use Slack or Hipchat, both of which are better than Skype.

Slack and Hipchat are pretty expensive, and I’m actually less annoyed by horrible UX and ads in Skype, than by the resource usage of Slack. But again - so long as slack and HipChat are $5k+ per year they need to be a lot better than the free options.

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#103

Post by eganist »

josefresco wrote: post #100
eganist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who at Apple thought this was intuitive? What's two flicks got that this doesn't? Or maybe if a shortcut was desired for extremely long views, why not make it a double tap?

Two flicks ?!? Try 4-5 (or more) flicks and you also have to wait for the scrolling to happen (at the speed of your flick) .... contrast that with one "press" on iOS - it's not even close - I use the feature daily.

Maybe scroll speeds need some work on iOS. On Android, two full swipes of a long source file or pdf have gotten me to the top. Haha

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#105

Post by cuckcuckspruce »

adornedCupcake wrote: post #72
legionof7 wrote: post #16

I made a request for e2e to Discord a while back. It became one of the most voted suggestions but got denied. Maybe this will push them to take another look.

On the other hand, I think they are trying to avoid the less nice usecases of communication by restricting themselves to gaming.

Less nice technically or socially? Speaking as someone who has played countless hours of competitive video games in my downtime after work, I assure you that, socially, 'less nice' is a charitable way to describe gaming chat, devolving into a constant torrent of abuse and harassment depending on your skill level, the sound of your voice, and the Dunning Kruger level of yourself and your other team members.

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#106

Post by gnicholas »

kurthr wrote: post #66
usaphp wrote: post #14

While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all. And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a cha…

Without this, where would we get all the work place camaraderie in meetings as people provide helpful suggestions to the presenter to get the remote site communication and sharing to connect!

From Hangouts commiseration, of course.

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#108

Post by drdaeman »

usaphp wrote: post #14

While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all. And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a cha…

Design? UX? I'd wish those are the only issues with Skype. If really necessary, can tolerate ugliest of the designs, if it works. Problem is, it doesn't.

It loses messages at random. Sometimes it fails to send (I was really angry when I had an important call, and my "Hey, I'm here, let's start" got stuck in "Sending..." forever - thankfully, web.skype.com worked. That message made it through only the next day.) Sometimes it fails to receive - someone asks me why I'm not responding and I check the messages and don't see anything.

And those "sometimes" are not once in a blue moon, but every other month (if not worse).

Unfortunately, suggestions to use something else are not really working so I've stopped trying. Everyone seems to hate Skype, everyone I've asked had recognized it barely works and is frequently unreliable, but almost everyone I know still sticks to it. :(

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#109

Post by rconti »

lvillani wrote: post #62
usaphp wrote: post #14

While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all. And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a cha…

> on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying! That's by design and standard iOS behaviour (it has been there for years). Tapping anywhere on the system toolbar (i.e. where the clock, wifi, signal strength indicators are) brings the main scrollable view to its…

WHOA. this is amazing. Must try.

Re: Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype

#110

Post by kwindla »

Over the last couple of years, there's been huge progress in making end-to-end encryption practical for "real world" apps -- especially stuff running in web browsers. Signal is part of that, of course, as is WebRTC, a standard that to its great credit did an excellent job with the encryption pieces from the very beginning.

We built our video calling app, Daily.co, on top of WebRTC and so we could relatively easily include end-to-end encryption from the day we launched.

A few things make e2e harder as you scale up. One is that metadata gets more and more important, for a lot of reasons, as you add features and try to grow a business. As has been pointed out here, Skype was end-to-end encrypted in the pre-Microsoft days.

Another challenge is that it's a lot easier to build e2e encryption for mesh network topologies than if you're routing things through central servers. For video calling, mesh networking breaks down as you add more users to a call. For us, that means we're e2e encrypted up to 4 people in a call. After that, we're forwarding video streams through our servers in the cloud, and we don't do e2e encryption anymore. (Not that we wouldn't like to, it's just a much heavier development lift.)

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