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Skype 5 for Mac

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Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#71

Post by amyshelton »

kingatomic wrote: post #20

I can echo the article's sentiments. I upgraded to the new client a few weeks ago and cannot adequately express the horror I experienced when my clean, intuitive UI/UX went away and was replaced by some forsaken window vomited up from a designer's darkest nightmare. In what possible world does coverflow for contacts make better sense than just a simple list? It took actual time for me to figure out how to find my con…

I think the most horrible part of that is that I continue to experience the same shock I felt when I first saw it each time I bring it up. It is like I'm seeing it again for the first time and have to reorient myself. I'm wondering how many times it will take for me to rewire my brain.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#72

Post by cjoh »

I remember when Apple released FaceTime, they said it'd be an open industry standard. See:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/07/apple_announce...

and

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177819/Jobs_has_loft...

Seems striking that it's been nearly a year and we haven't heard a peep about making it open. I would presume that if it were, it could be possible to bridge the two protocols or eliminate the need for skype.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#73

Post by raganwald »

lovskogen wrote: post #65
elliottcarlson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My second point was more that Skype should improve the application for both platforms. Certainly interoperability isn't an issue - the point is that it's in their best interest to maintain a common application interface. For example, I work at a company of 50 people and we have all variations of Mac, Windows and Linux machines running. By being able to support one interface internally it makes it a lot easier - as we…

And easier for you is better than easier for 49 people?

By way of agreeing with you I will say that yes, easier for IT is "better" than easier for the users, and this has nothing to do with PCs and Macs, it has to do with the fact that there is no spot in the company's financials for the time and efficiency lost by products that do what they are supposed to do, but do it poorly.

Whereas, it's easy to measure the amount of time IT spends supporting the product. So if there are two different UIs, it's easy to see that you need two different training sessions for users, but hard to measure how much time the Mac users lose struggling with the UI.

As I said, this is hardly a Mac/PC thing. You often see it in horribly designed internal applications. It's easy to measure the cost of development but hard to measure the productivity lost due to craptacular UX. So in 2011 I still see RFQs from clients asking for search pages where you fill in a complex form indicating which field you want searched and how to search it, instead of implementing a single full-text search across the application.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#76

Post by Apocryphon »

miah_ wrote: post #64
Apocryphon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the most essential programs in life the ones that always have the most obscenely bloated updates?

The only reason iTunes seems to be essential is because there is almost no competition on OSX. Its a fairly horrible music player / media organizer compared to most Windows based software. I only use Skype to video chat with my daughters and it could be easily swapped over to Google chat + Video.

I'm not talking about just iTunes and Skype, though. I can think of several consumer programs that have become more bloated with worse UIs over time- AIM, Ad-Aware, Windows Media Player, Firefox...

It seems rather inevitable.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#77

Post by elliottcarlson »

lovskogen wrote: post #65
elliottcarlson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My second point was more that Skype should improve the application for both platforms. Certainly interoperability isn't an issue - the point is that it's in their best interest to maintain a common application interface. For example, I work at a company of 50 people and we have all variations of Mac, Windows and Linux machines running. By being able to support one interface internally it makes it a lot easier - as we…

And easier for you is better than easier for 49 people?

You are missing my point, and that could very well by my fault in not explaining it properly.

Why should an end user, who could use multiple platforms, need to understand two different layouts for the same program. This has nothing to do with different vendors, but the fact that a company needs to invest serious time in to developing a UI that is intuitive in all platforms they are targeting. The user experience should be well thought out so that it is a great application that takes advantage of the operating system interfaces that they are working with. If that user experience is lacking then someone dropped the ball - which is a burden for end users, IT folks and so forth.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#79

Post by stefanobernardi »

Skype 2.8 UI was messy, with windows popping up everywhere and sidebars going crazy. Skype 5 is just perfect, and in all honesty can't find anything wrong with it a part of the chat while calling thing.

Re: Skype 5 for Mac

#80

Post by jeff18 »

There is still no way to turn off birthday notifications on Mac OS X. That is, any time it is any one of your contact's birthdays, Skype sends you a mandatory message about it which requires user action to dismiss.
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