I want a version of Skype that doesn’t suck.
To be fair to the MacOS team that works on Skype they’ve got a lot of things spot on. Skype for MacOS X is a Cocoa app and it feels good, it works well with other programs and on the whole it fits in. There are a couple of things about it which annoy the socks off me though and out of them there are two that really stick out in my mind.
One of the problems could probably be blamed on the Mac developers working for Skype but the other is probably beyond their control.
Whinge #1 – The splash screen
UPDATE: Turns out there is an option in Skype’s preferences for this but there is no way to set it using the GUI. You can set the option using the standard defaults tool by running “defaults write com.skype.skype SKShowSplash NO” or, if you are living dangerously, open ~/Library/Prefences/com.skype.skype.plist in the property list editor and change SKShowSplash there.
Splash screens are something you rarely see on a Mac and they’re specifically listed as being a bad idea by Apple’s user interface guidelines. Despite this Skype throws one over the top of whatever you might be working on and, to make matters worse, doesn’t provide a way to get rid of it again. Even if you focus on another window it will remain hidden until the splash screen finally goes away.
It’s not as though the splash screen achieves anything, you already know the program is loading from the way its icon bounces gently in the Dock (just like any program that’s starting up).
The splash screen also makes the option to have Skype start when you log in useless since it throws up its always-on-top-let-me-just-hover-in-front-of-what-you’re-doing splash screen right when you most want to start working on something.
Sadly, it looks like we’re out of luck as far as disabling it goes, at least for the time being. Windows users can start Skype with the /nosplash option and it will remain politely silent until it has something useful to tell the user. I tried editing the splash screen’s NIB file to move it or at least make it smaller but it seems that Skype checks the integrity of its files before launching. Very annoying.
Whinge #2 – Video support
The Mac client still doesn’t support video calls despite the length of time it’s been available in the Windows client. I don’t think this is really something that the developers can be blamed for though. It seems likely that who ever is in charge of deciding what the developers work on just doesn’t see platforms other than Windows as being very important.
I can live without video support but it’d be nice to have it as an option and there are times when it would be very handy. If it were feasible I’d just use iChat for video calls but that’d more or less throw cross platform use out the window, and if iChat was a decent cross platform option I wouldn’t bother with Skype at all.