Skype for Mac 5.0 beta released

Yikes. What I liked about the previous version of skype was the relatively streamlined real estate. This version looks like a suburban mini mansion. On my macbook the new layout takes up half of the screen. Normally this would not be a problem if you can actually change the settings, font size, styling, or something. Haven't found out how to do that yet.<p>Rule of thumb for designers: Whitespace is your friend. But using it doesn't guarantee that your interface will be better.

Windows: 5.0, Mac: 5.0, Linux: 2.1<p>I understand putting Mac and Windows versions before Linux versions, but a 3 version difference is starting to get ridiculous. Skype for Linux 2.1 is perfectly usable (apart from sometimes forgetting all settings), but getting it up to the level of it's cross-platform brothers would be nice. Skype has been teasing "something" for Linux for like a year now, so I wonder what happened to that.

Coverflow for your contacts seems a bit superfluous.

Nice, but I've had consistently bad experiences with calls on Skype. Over the years (including at the current time) I constantly get situations where Skype's connection freezes or drops or the audio becomes unacceptable.<p><a href="http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/if-only-skype-worked.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/if-only-skype-worked.html</a>

This was very uncomfortable to use. It does not feel right, it looks like a poor knock off of Finder, it immediately interrupted my work-flow and sat uncomfortably on my screen (24" on spaces and a 22" secondary; I am not short on screen space).<p>I reinstalled the old version after about 30 minutes of use. Horrible.

Group video chat!<p>One less reason to use iChat. Phew.

Warning: excessive whitespace abounds.

I wish they would rather solve the ridiculous memory footprint of skype in windows. The other day it had 300M private bytes

I wish they would work on their linux client too

Without Canadian Skype in phone numbers, this still isn't a must-need application for 33 million folks.

I find it hard to support a closed communications system like Skype that makes it impossible for third parties to develop client applications. I also don't trust the encryption since it's all closed.

If only they would solve the CPU hog problem... I open one Skype video chat and the MBP gets hot, fans start to work at full speed, etc. That doesn't happen on my Windows laptops.

I'm hoping a later revision has more "View" options. The whitespace and general padding on the contacts as well as the chats is pretty bad.

I have no idea what the Windows version looks like but the Mac version looks like crap. Why is it taking up half my screen?

Is it possible to make video full–screen in this version of Skype? I can’t for the life of me figure out how.

H.323 baby!

One word: AVOID