Yikes. What I liked about the previous version of skype was the relatively streamlined real estate. This version looks like a suburban mini mansion. On my macbook the new layout takes up half of the screen. Normally this would not be a problem if you can actually change the settings, font size, styling, or something. Haven't found out how to do that yet.
Rule of thumb for designers: Whitespace is your friend. But using it doesn't guarantee that your interface will be better.
I really think they got the right idea by making it look more "mac" window/finder like....
But they totally missed the mark by putting so much white space and padding around everything.
The minimal size I can shrink the window to is still >=33% of my 20" monitor, even with "Compact Sidebar" and smaller font.
They really should have studied the Mac OS user interface a bit more before releasing this. It seems like they fell into the whole lots of white-space and big font web-design trends...
I think they new interface isn't the "online contacts" sidebar anymore, they've got a separate HUD view for that now (sidebar -> small icon next to "CONTACTS"). If you use that for starting conversations and hide the main window, it's actually somewhat usable. Would be better if there were an option to hide the silly avatar pictures there, too.
Edit: Just noticed that the HUD window is always on top. Dang. Let's see if that Adium plugin is still in development…
-cpu still an issue
-new groups ordering is somewhat confusing. i don't want a ridiculously big window listing all my online contacts with WAY to much whitespace around. i want my groups :(
-hud contact list is always on top, that is seriously annoying
-the hud window gives no feedback/options to me (except double clicking, which opens the other BIG window with the chat)
-the cover flow contact list is just..
and the list goes on
Horrible! Completely agree: this window can't be resized below 400 pixels wide. Crazy. I used to have the skype contacts as a long column on the right of my screen (less than 100px width).
They do have an option to sort of still do that, but it's a floating window that appears in front of everything else, with very high transparency.
Frankly, if I could revert to the previous version with one click, I'd do it instantly.
Oh, I found "make text smaller" under view. But this is context sensitive and not global. So now I have different conversations with different sized font. Who is designing this product?
I will be converting this to the new Skype at some point over the next week. The styles are full HTML, CSS and JS. The messages are all placed into the view with JS so its fairly easy to customise to your hearts content.
I'm really not sure how this is relevant to a company that has over 15,000 employees (non retail). If you've done any work for apple or their HR department you would most certainly know it's not run like a startup.
Rule of thumb for designers: Whitespace is your friend. But using it doesn't guarantee that your interface will be better.