Garage & Updates

Earlier this month, we promised an update to Skype for Mac that would get along beautifully with Leopard’s firewall. Today’s hotfix to Skype 2.7 for Mac beta does just that. In other words, users of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) are welcome to run Skype with confidence.

The second thing that we believe will bring smiles to a lot of folks is this: today’s beta version of Skype 2.7 for Mac adds attractive pixel muscle to your video calls. That’s because we’ve now turned on 640×480-pixel video by default.

So, as long as your webcam can handle this resolution, your friends should see the bigger-and-improved you on their screens. At a better frame rate, too — we’ve been squeezing up to 25 fps out of our systems.

Now, because sending out higher-resolution video needs a faster processor and a fatter internet pipe, you’ll benefit greatly from having a fast machine (think Core 2 Duo) and a broadband connection with at least 384kbps upload speeds.

If the receiver is using a pre-2.7 version of Skype for Mac, or if their machine cannot handle 640×480 video resolution (like G4 or G5 Macs that are slower than 1.25 GHz), the sender’s Skype software will scale the video feed down to 320×240 pixels (or even 160×120, if needed).

Please remember we’re dealing with beta software here. So you may encounter the occasional quirk and hiccup as you’re using it. If you’d rather stick with public versions Skype that have a lot of beta wrinkles ironed out, we’ve just issued a Leopard-friendly hotfix to the public version of Skype 2.6 for Mac. Enjoy!