Hello again!

It’s been 10 days since we launched the first Beta of Skype 4.0 for Windows, so I thought it would be a good idea to reflect a little and to respond to some of the feedback we’ve received.

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who has given us their thoughts via our feedback site, on this and our other blogs, but also via the various feedback mechanisms we introduced for this Beta. It always amazes me how many people are so passionate about Skype and that’s what makes it so enjoyable to get up and come to work every morning (apart from last Thursday – boy, did my head hurt).

We’ve had very different reactions to Beta 1, in particular the big change we made of having Skype in a larger window. One of the primary reasons for doing this was that we found an overwhelming majority of people had trouble working with multiple windows and were using Skype mainly to make calls and video calls, especially amongst those new to Skype. We’ve had some very positive feedback from a lot of people on the new way of working, and that’s encouraging as it seems we’re starting to solve the problems that we set out to solve. However, it’s very understandable some of you used to using Skype on a regualar basis have been a bit frustrated about not being able to work with Skype the way they are used to.

We always planned to address our more advanced users in a second beta, and I just wanted to say – don’t worry — we will address the need to have Skype take up less room on the screen with a feature that allows you to reduce the size – we call it compact mode. We hope to get it out towards the end of the summer with our second beta release.

Other people have also commented on being able to resize video. There are a few things you can do here in Beta 1. Firstly, in the single window, you can resize both your own video and the video of the other person you are talking to. If you hover over the bottom left corner of the video feeds, you will find this functionality. What you can also do is pop out the video window using this button -> , which you’ll see at the top right hand corner of your screen, to the right of the “+ Add people” button.

Which, will mean, if you’re on a video call, you’ll see something like this:

We will make further improvements to this with Beta 2.

Finally, a lot of people have asked about a Mac version. Both the Mac and Linux teams here at Skype are working closely with us on this Beta. They are reading all of this feedback and will be picking out the truly great bits and putting them into their respective versions. So you can certainly expect to see something on Mac after summer.

Again, thank you for your passion and you enthusiasm – and hopefully you are enjoying Skype 4.0 Beta 1.

Speak to you again soon.

Mike Bartlett
Director of Product Management, Skype for Windows

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