Customise Skype for Mac in our theme design competition
Calling all designers! This is your opportunity to customise Skype for Mac. We’ve just launched our chat style competition to kick things off. When we first launched our new Mac app, we were delighted to see so many custom styles emerge from the design community, so we thought we’d make it official.
Between now and the 29th April, we’re inviting you to design your own chat style for Skype for Mac. We’ve assembled a team of experts to choose the very best, and if you’re the winner, we’ll include your design in a future version of Skype for Mac so that it can be enjoyed by millions of people around the world (as well as giving you a brand new MacBook Air, an iPad 2 and a year’s subscription to Unlimited World Extra).
The competition will run over three stages, each lasting three weeks. Two winners will be selected at the end of each stage; a judges’ choice winner that will be selected by our panel and a people’s choice winner, as voted for by all of you. These six winners will go forward as finalists for the grand prize. There are more prizes for runners-up, including iPads and copies of CSS3 for Web Designers – check the competition page for details.
Today also marks the release of a minor update to Skype for Mac. You’ll start to see these a lot more frequently now, as we move from our annual release cycle to a process which will allow us to get you updates much more regularly. This new version includes improvements to the group video calling interface, increases the amount of space in the sidebar and gives you quick access to recently called numbers from the dial pad. You can find out more on the Garage blog, or download it now.
Finally, a note to those of you who have commented on the user interface as a whole. We’re in the process of developing some changes which will offer a lot more flexibility in the interface, and they’re on the roadmap for a (near) future version. Stay tuned.
Is it possible to allow custom designs to redesign the whole interface, so that we could have custom mods to make Skype 5 look and work more like Skype 2?
How about you redesign the horrible UI of Skype 5 for Mac first. Seriously, its really that bad. We don’t want a browser size app for an IM client!
Dear Krishna,
I’ve been a happy Skype user for years but the latest 5.1x version is utterly atrocious. First of all, it doesn’t allow you set a default view. Instead it reverts to a group setting.
I liked the older, simpler version: you immediately see who’s online. In 5.1x you have to RESET EVERY TIME YOU LOGIN. This isn’t a feature; it’s a bug.
In addition, I see loads of my offline contacts. If they’re offline, really who cares? Those offline contacts should be collapsable so that you’re really dying to call them you can.
Adding loads of bells and whistles doesn’t help the user experience. It detracts from it. For example, the sidebar has who has appeared today, this month, older than a month. Seriously who cares? That sidebar is a real waste of screen space.
ALL I WANT TO SEE IS SIMPLY WHO IS ONLINE.
Victor Long
So I made a skin CSS file and I want to test my design in real life.
If I put it into the panamericana package folder and replace the main.css file, my Skype wouldn’t start anymore.
So how do I do this?
Try to design a better client – less hungry of screen space and computer memory.
Chat style it’s not so important.
Krishna,
The new Skype for Mac is HORRIBLE! It is a space hog, bloated, completely unintuitive, and barely usable. PLEASE go back to the drawing board, speak with some Mac users, and release another version ASAP.
Also, allowing people to go back to the old version until you get it right may help Skype keep some of it user base.
Michael
Please Skype team, don’t move on to add other new stuff when everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone, hates your 5.X version on the Mac.
What will matter to have a nice chat window, if no one likes the whole application?
As many other people I’m staying with 2.8, and I don’t care about chat windows, or anything else you think will add benefits to the 5.x version, just get rid of that horrible interface!!!
can people that use windows participate in this competition? If so what are the instructions for opening and using the files in windows?
Thanks!
Over the years, I’ve been a happy user of Skype, SkypeIn, and SkypeOut, and your subscription services. In that time, I’ve spent a ton of money on your services, and recommended Skype to friends, family, and colleagues. And then Skype v5 came out. I tried — I really tried — to use it, but after almost a week of sadistically torturing myself, I reinstalled v2.8.
And now I have to ask, as a paying customer with an interest in continuing to use Skype for a long time, why are you people messing around with idiotic theme competitions instead of fixing the application that you recently broke? I agree wholeheartedly with Selfpartwo: we don’t want a browser size app for a simple communications program. Moreover, we don’t need a browser size app for it.
Does this mean you will not be addressing the hideous UI in Skype 5 for Mac anytime soon? You should start a similar competition that focuses in creating a real Mac-like application.
Copying your horrible all-in-one design of Skype for Windows does not count as creating a Mac-like application, adding useless options such as viewing my contacts in Cover-Flow style will not make it a Mac-like application. This is computer program, computers have a keyboard and a mouse, thus we don’t need gigantic buttons nor a gigantic UI.
If the Skype team truly believes that their new innovative design is amazing and that all the fuss and comments about it from users are nonsense, do us a favor and don’t upload videos to YouTube claiming that Skype 5 for Mac is a real Mac-like application, it is irritating.
Is it just me, or is this kind of insulting?
Yes, a theme SKD is nice. Adium, iChat, Trillian… the entirety of your competition, have done this for years, so cheers to catching up. But…
“We’ve assembled a team of experts to choose the very best”
If you have a team of UI and design experts, why does Skype need redesigning? People are theming Skype, railing against the new UI, and generally upset because it seems that you, in fact, do not have design experts on your team.
One of the reasons I’ve become an avid Skype user is the Mac version’s much cleaner interface. As the family tech-head, I’ve many times been called upon to fix PC Skype related issues, and was continually amazed at the UI clutter—side bar tabs all over the place, menus at the top of the screen that can’t be removed, assorted “helpful” bright buttons and blinking lights. It was terrible when compared to the clean and tidy Mac version. And while some of that cleanliness came at the expense of feature equality, I don’t use Skype for the myriad of minor extra features that the PC version boasted (especially considering 3rd party plugins…).
All I need a list of people, a quickly recognizable means of understanding availability, and occasionally, a dial pad. I don’t need Cover Flow to display a list of low resolution, and often in poor taste, avatars.
“and if you’re the winner, we’ll include your design in a future version of Skype for Mac”
Am I getting paid for doing your design ‘experts’ job? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that your design team earns more than “a brand new MacBook Air, an iPad 2 and a year’s subscription to Unlimited World Extra)”. Those gifts, while more than enough to encourage user submitted themes, seem inadequate compensation for the task of what is essentially consulting with, or giving a launching point to, your design team.
“so that it can be enjoyed by millions of people around the world”
Which is good for me if I’m credited and can include having built a UI scheme for Skype in my portfolio or in my CV. Can I?
“Finally, a note to those of you who have commented on the user interface as a whole.”
Everyone.
“We’re in the process of developing some changes which will offer a lot more flexibility in the interface, and they’re on the roadmap for a (near) future version.”
Does it not make more sense to roll out these changes and then host a design competition?
You are now giving away thousands of dollars worth of prizes and spending the time and energy of your user base for the sake of designs which may become obsolete (or at the very least incomplete—imagine what the winning artist might have done with full window control…) in the “near” future.
If you’re going to put the fate of Skype’s UI in the hands of the public give us the complete tool set, and thereby, the ability to resolve the root of Skype 5′s glaring design problems.
~ Aaron
http://drperil.com
Hello, Krishna!
I use Skype for a long time and used to have the history of calls separate from the messages in the previous versions. Now everything is mixed together. I try hard to find a way of just having the list of calls, but I can’t find how. Is this feature of listings calls separately “hidden” somewhere in the actual version?
If not, I would suggest that Skype developers put back this feature that is so important for my work.
I would appreciate you answer and help about this matter.
Thanks!
Hi, I’m a Skype for Mac user,
appart from agreeing with meiyaus about the sidebar being useless, another feature about the Skype 5 version i dislike is that the chat windows are all in one, i liked it better in the older version where the windows were separate. however, the tabs could be useful if put in the sidebar instead of the ‘who has appeared today, this week, this month’ information.
but I enjoy the feature with the split screen when in video call – in the older version it was set as two different windows and created chaos trying to locate the chat window.
I love and enjoy skype very much since 2003, and i would only love to see it improve as time passes
Loyal user Anja
Only chat themes? Really? Redo the whole thing, and don’t be so cheap to put the major design job on a contest for a laptop! Did cheap calls make your business thinking cheap as well? Think better if you want mac users to actually use your services, because the 5th version screams: don’t use me! uninstall me! switch to other soft!
This latest update “increases the amount of space” in the UI? Seriously?! Did you not read the hundreds of comments on the last Mac post? FYI, they weren’t cheering over the expansive design. Unbelievable.
I have to agree with all the above comments. This is the worst skype version ever. It is so difficult to use, the layout doesn’t make sense, the thing is too big and bulky.. horrible!Thank God I found Facetime for Mac, because I am not using skype until it’s more like the old version. Absolute rubbish.
isn’t it funny how you keep getting the same comments from all mac users & still you guys seem to be in denial? everyone agrees, the current skype design is a disaster in terms of space management – too much unused spaces doing nothing, & too much redundancy in controls. case for example, the “add contact button”. this is probably the 3rd comment I’m posting to highlight these problems. the menubar exists for a reason & there’s free space lying vacant & idle – use it efficiently… & more importantly avoid redundant buttons. instead of just redesigning the chat style, you need to have a contest to redesign the main window style!
please give us the old ui back. The gui of skype 5 is horrible. Please keep it simple and clean.
FFFUUU! I would never update to this ugly 5.1 version of Skype. Look of version 5.1 is the ugliest thing that could happen with any app on Mac OS X. I’ve never seen mac app uglier that Skype 5.1. Previously I was showing Skype on mac to my friends as example of good chat application design, but now I can’t.
You’d better start redesigning look of Skype client itself than thinking about stuff like chat window.
The new UI is very bad. I find myself constantly trying to reduce the size of the massive window. The huge bar across the top with my name, ‘Add Credit,’ and the search area is a great example of a complete waste of space. The huge bar across the top of chats is another great example, how can something so big make navigating the list of people in a chat so hard?
I prefer the nice tight contact list from prior versions, and the separate chat windows. Here are some ideas on how to fix the issues: 1) make the list of contacts its own window again, keeping it as small as possible; 2) make conversations their own window again (ideally able to be split out individually). When you do step 2, drop the monstrous bar from the top back down to the size of the nice slim bar from prior versions.
Look at modern browsers, like the new FireFox 4 and Chrome, they are minimizing the space needlessly wasted by the browser UI. You should do the same.
IN ADDITION TO YOUR HORRIBLE INTERFACE. the screen sharing feature has become unbearably slow!!!!!!
seriously, what are you guys thinking when releasing this Skype 5.1 for Mac? ???
ur software department need to be fired!
“We’ve assembled a team of experts…”
LOL
I endorse a cutting edge technology based solution with a pro-active consumer centric business model…
Hey all.
I created a Chat Style and also redesigned the UI.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
View it on Behance
Expression wisdom of the crowd springs to mind. This latest release is horrendous. As previously quoted, as if an IM client needed to use so much real estate. And when it comes to usability, it would seem that long gone are the days when the “soccer mom” acid test was the key driver in developing the client UI. Example? history is such a “advanced user” feature but is displayed by default. And that is w/o mentioning the obvious stuff such as only seeing only my contacts that are online, not a plethora of users offline…
Seems like K.I.S.S(kype) would be a great guideline to stick to.
Skype 5 is the worst Skype version ever. The UI is absolutely unusable. the contact list is much to big. so much space wasted for big buttons and no way to change that. the sidebar is complete nonsense. sorry but you really messed this version up.
Ditto what everyone says. I’ll throw my cents in and say that Mac users care about design, so when the Mac community as a whole is complaining, it’s bad. The UI is awful! One huge window makes sense for PC users but the Mac desktop is completely different — the v.2 design was much more complimentary. We don’t care about skins, bring back the old view format!
Skype! You used to be so awesome! D:
In case you guys are waiting for users to “get used” to the new UI: I’ve been using the new UI since the very first beta some months ago. And in all that time, many hours a day, there’s no ‘getting used’. More the opposite, really — especially since the 5.1 update (which, in a surreal turn of events, made things even worse).
Contrary to popular belief, the core problem is not that the ‘chat is big’. Nor do we need everything reverted back to the previous version. But: the interaction design desperately needs an overhaul — the design of the new single-window interface failed massively. It’s all in the management of calls, finding where the missing chat text or file transfer went (“I’m hearing it, but where is it?”), finding out where screensharing is, adding or removing people, dragging and dropping people into groups, etcetera. In literally every call my team makes, we spend at least a couple of minutes trying to help someone else do one of those things. Skype is wonderful – please stop ruining it.
Any info about how long we could submit the design? It’s opening now.
It looks like Skype’s solution to their disaster of an upgrade is, hey, lets have the users fix it! Fail!
With 20+ years designing graphic user interfaces, I have to agree with most of the comments in the above blog (however rudely stated). Skype is a utility and should not hog the screen as though it were a sovereign application that requires the user’s visual attention for long periods of time or that involves complex interaction. The visual design is bloated; the interaction model is inflexible; and the interaction design is largely non-intuitive and clumsy. In short, this is a dreadful UI design, whose best quality is to serve the UI-design community as an example of how wrong design can go.
I also agree with the above comments that holding a competition to do your design work is a bit like clutching at straws, by making a public appeal to do the work that you should know how to do. You need to hire a strong design leader who can create a clear design vision and can execute against that vision. That vision is obviously lacking at the moment.
Functionally, Skype is a leading-edge utility; it deserves a top-flight design.
Paul Eisen
OMG would you open the competition already? It’s delayed like for a 5th time!!!!
Enter your submissions on April 8, today is April 13!
The entry submission was supposed to start 4 days ago, according to the terms on the page. It clearly reads: Entries can be submitted from the 10th April, 2011.
And the stage one deadline is 29th: “29 April: Stage one deadline”
What gives? My theme is all ready to go, zipped, with a screenshot and even packed to be used with Skype if anybody wants to.
Hi Skype
When are we going to be able to video record our video conversations on iphones?