

Skype Blog: Skype for Windows 8 - kefs
http://blogs.skype.com/en/2012/10/skype_for_windows8.html

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jasonkester
"Always On" frightens me. Receiving a Skype call these days involves answering
it on my laptop, then finding and silencing all my iPads and other mobile
devices that continue to ring at me obnoxiously. "Hang on a second while I...
[hop hop hop on one foot while headphoned to the laptop and slowly dragging it
off the table while trying to grab that backpack in the corner witn my
toes]... Got it. Anyway, what were you saying?"

The iOS version of Skype has no "quit" option at all. If you ever open it for
any reason, it'll dingle at you incessantly from there on out until you hard
reboot the device. It's my current top annoyance with Skype.

So when they start announcing that annoyance as the big feature of their new
version, it doesn't exactly get me excited to try it.

~~~
thejosh
Yeah, my friends love the constant ONLINE! OFFLINE! ONLINE! OFFLINE! When I go
in and out of wifi range on my iPhone. Have had to set it to appear offline...

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sek
Now we see Microsoft's marketing department, always these smiling, good
looking, ethnic diverse, people with too perfect illumination and image
coloring. There is one guy at Microsoft who thinks this is the only way of
making pictures.

It always looks so artificial and impersonal. Also kinda boring. Nokia is
worse, it's similar but only people in their twenties and "hip".

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UnoriginalGuy
I have Windows 8 (desktop). I cannot express enough how much I DON'T want that
version of Skype.

If Skype force me to use their "app" version then I will literally stop using
Skype entirely.

I also don't want to be "always on." In fact things like Google's Circles
where I can select with greater granularity who I am "on" for is my number one
request for Skype. At the moment I am forced to have two Skype accounts, one
for home, and one for work for that reason.

~~~
thomaslutz
Do you like Windows 8 so far? Why did you switch? I tried the Release
Candidate for like 10 minutes, but hated it so much I deleted the VM it was
running in immediately afterwards.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I switched to Windows 8 because I wanted to familiarise myself with it for its
eventual launch. It is my opinion that you cannot have a valid opinion on
something (good or bad) unless you've given it a fair shot. I am running the
RTM (retail) version released on MSDN/Technet+/Volume Licences/et al.

I've ran it for about a month and while Windows Explorer is a big step
forwards, everything related to the "Modern" UI (Metro) is a big step
backwards. The apps are poor, the finish is poor, and the intuition is non-
existent.

The whole thing feels like an unfinished product. It is like they released it
mid-production and thus ideas are only half baked. For just one example, the
old-fashioned Control Panel is still used to configure 75%+ of the system but
yet getting to it is now buried.

Originally I was going to recommend you get W8 if you had a touch device, but
given how badly Modern UI is currently performing I am instead recommending
getting either an iPad or an Android Tablet. Both of which will give a better
user experience.

The biggest issue I would say is not the design/concepts but instead just how
poorly they have been carried out, how rushed, and how messy.

Imagine for a second that Apple's development philosophy was 70% features and
then 30% polish. Now imagine that Microsoft's previous development philosophy
was 85% features and then 15% polish. Well on this same scale Windows 8 would
be 99% features 1% polish (with a rounding error of 1%).

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fenesiistvan
Look at the 2 fake comment at the blog page :)

~~~
sek
"I love metro version of Skype!"

I doubt that, "metro" is used. This is so funny, it was actually a good brand
for the new interface. Now they try it with Windows 8....

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thomaslutz
This is even worse than the Mac version of Skype (though many users complained
about the inability to fully customize the contactlist column-size, e.g. for
seeing the full name of the contacts instead of the meaningless status-column,
nothing happened).

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TruthElixirX
Why are all of the images 1,680px × 1,050px then scaled down in the image tag?

Also, every version of Skype I use gets progressively worse. Facebook
integration! Status updates from your friends! We moved feature A to menu B.
Just make my calls not fucking suck.

~~~
sesqu
They are 1,366x768 resized to 600x350 for me, which I guess could ha started
as a retina thing.

~~~
josteink
It would indeed be hilarious if Microsoft mangled web-standards to comply with
Apple's broken non-standard additions.

The circle of incompetence would be complete.

~~~
sesqu
This is not a Windows blog, it's a Skype one. I find it entirely plausible
that someone on their web team has been sold on resizing to 50% in the
browser, which is one suggested way to engage Apple's spare pixels.

edit: Also, even if it were a Microsoft blog, I still wouldn't consider it an
impossibility. There are devices running Windows Phone with Retina-comparable
pixel densities, so Microsoft must have considered taking advantage of the
super-resolution capabilities in a compatible manner. I don't know if they
have done so, but it would be silly if they didn't use any of that spare
hardware capability.

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89a
Sick of seeing video conferencing using SUPER HD IMAGES to show the
broadcasting. I doubt it even looks that good in lab conditions.

