Skype for Mac 5.0 Goes Gold, Only Deserves Bronze

My biggest complaint is that it’s still too big and adding users to a call is still a bit of a dark art. Skype also seems to be in a real hurry to ditch audio calls in favour of premium video conference calls which just seem to make everyone involved feel awkward. The reality is that the majority of users will not pay a premium price for the novelty factor and those who would use more often are probably being pushed towards one of CISCO’s newly acquired Tandberg devices with dedicated bandwidth than want to rely on service that regularly gets throttled by ISP. You know who you are EVIL CANUCK TELCOS!

For podcasters like us, they’ve also removed the incredibly useful green audio-level meter from each individual user, instead we are forced to stare at each other’s avatar and are merely shown the user’s name in green when they are talking. Not only is this still a huge hog on the desktop space but the green on black visualization is almost impossible to see when I’m talking about another window on my screen but want to monitor who is saying what out of the corner of my eye. I would appear that Skype tried to create a TWiT.tv style Skypeasaurus[1. Skypeasuarus, as far as we can tell, TWiT.tv’s version is actually a lot better than the Skype version and doesn’t force the participant to pay for the premium group video calling feature either.] without asking if anyone else then Leo Laporte actually wants to use it this way. As some of you might already know. I downgraded my Skype to 2.8.0.866 after DadCast 37 where I erroneously accused our most awesome guest Stephen Hackett of pounding away at this keyboard when it was in fact the fault of our very own Schultzter. Now I have to send Stephen a fruit basket and a snow shovel so will return my calls ;).

And for this reason the Gold version of Skype 5.0 only get a bronze medal for being too big, over bearing and removing actually useful features.