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3 Interesting Omissions from the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X
Continue Reading: 3 Interesting Omissions from the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS XSince the launch of Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac last week, I’ve continued use it on one Mac and simultaneously using the current Skype 2.8 on another Mac. In using both, I’ve been struck by a couple of interesting omissions.One is somewhat trivial but was always kind of fun to see – the 2.8 client listed the number of people online in the bottom right corner:
As a numbers/stats geek, it was kind of fun to see that number change over time, both in terms of hours of the day and also the overall growth. If this number is somehow visible in the Skype 5.0 Beta, I’ve yet to see it.
UPDATE: This was added to a 5.0 release, but through a typed command, not directly in the user interface as it was in Skype 2.8. You can now go into any chat in the 5.x client and type: /mac users to see the number of users currently online.
UPDATE – 5 Mar 2012: This
/mac userscommand no longer works in at least the Skype 5.5 client for the Mac.UPDATE – 6 Mar 2012: It turns out that the command in Skype 5.5 for Mac OS X…
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Congrats to Mark Headd for joining Voxeo Labs and Tropo.com
Continue Reading: Congrats to Mark Headd for joining Voxeo Labs and Tropo.comFlickr credit: ecommconf
I was delighted to see the official word go out today that Mark Headd will be joining our Voxeo Labs team to work on promoting our Tropo cloud communications service. For the past few years I’ve had the privilege of working with Mark as an “external” developer on a range of projects related to Voxeo’s platforms. Mark has a very strong interest in “open government” which is also a passion of mine (although I don’t get to work too much on issues related to it) and maintains his Vox Populi blog where he outlines many of his various projects connecting voice, IM, SMS and Twitter to various government projects. (Usually using one of Voxeo’s platforms or various open source systems.)
One cool aspect about Mark is his flexibility in languages and topics. He’s equally at home contributing a series of guest blog posts about VoiceXML, writing about building an IM (and Twitter) Bot for the NY State Senate Legislative API, writing a series of posts about building multichannel transit apps with PHP and Tropo or showing how to connect Phono and Tropo to a CCXML app to enable screen pops via…
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VIDEO: Review of Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X, including Group Video
Continue Reading: VIDEO: Review of Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X, including Group VideoWant to SEE the new Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X in action? Over on the Voxeo blog for my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I posted a video review of the Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X. You can see the new UI and see the Group Video calling capabilities:
I’m using the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac on my personal iMac, where screen real estate isn’t a problem at all and so far it’s interesting… it definitely takes a good bit of time to get used to. Over on my work MacBook Pro, I’m still using Skype 2.8.x until I’m really sure I want to make the switch. 🙂
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Hate all the whitespace in Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac? Re-style it!
Continue Reading: Hate all the whitespace in Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac? Re-style it!Want to get rid of all the whitespace in the new Skype for Mac UI? With the release yesterday of Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac, many folks I know predictably trashed the new user interface and raised many issues with it. One of the annoyances I had was the sheer amount of whitespace that surrounded the chat messages. I have a LOT of chats open… and many are VERY busy, so all the whitespace resulted in a lot of extra space. It turns out that there’s a relatively simple fix:RE-STYLE THE CHAT!
Using some very simple instructions after someone nicely created a new style we could use, here’s my user experience:
MUCH nicer for large chats!
As outlined in this post, “Styling Skype Beta for Mac“, it turns out that chats can be styled through the typical combination of CSS, HTML and JavaScript. As Maykel Loomans writes in that post, you can right-click Skype.app in your Applications folder, choose “Show Package Contents” and then go into Contents > Resources > ChatStyles. There is only one style there, “Panamericana”, which is a package you can then copy, open up and restyle:
I chose not to try Maykel’s “Panamargincana” style…
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Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X: A First Look at Group Video
Continue Reading: Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X: A First Look at Group VideoContinuing on from Part 1 where I looked at the new user interface in the Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X including using chats and making audio calls, let’s look at video and the new Group Video. UPDATE: I now have a video review available on YouTube showing the Group Video feature in action.
Video – and Group Video
Making a video call is very much the same experience as an audio call – make the call with the video button next to your contact or press the video button in a audio call. You get your standard small “preview” screen and you see the person you are calling. You can pull up the video window so that you can see the chat. If you don’t move the mouse over the window for a bit, the controls fade away so that you see the entire screen of the other persons video. All in all pretty nicely done:
(And yes, I deliberately covered some of the names of the chats. 🙂 ) For those curious, the person I’m calling is Chaim Haas who works with PR for Skype.
Adding someone else in launches the Group Video feature where you first have…
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Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X: A First Look with Screenshots
Continue Reading: Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X: A First Look with ScreenshotsCould it really be true? Was Skype actually delivering a MacOS X version that was close to parity with the Skype for Windows version? After all the complaining we Mac users have done?
Yes, indeed, for better or worse, today is the day… Skype is releasing Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X!
First Thoughts
I say “for better or worse” because the initial reaction that pretty much every Mac user is going to have is:
OMG, Skype COMPLETELY changed the user interface!
That they did… and some people will love it… and some will absolutely hate it. The good news for those of us who have ranted about Skype’s fragmented product strategy is that this release brings the UI much closer to the Skype for Windows UI so there is a more consistent experience across the platforms. (Although Jim Courtney points out that the UI is NOT the same as the Windows UI.) The bad news for many “power users” is that this release brings the UI much closer to the Skype for Windows UI! 🙂
Counting myself among those “power users” (and working at Voxeo where we are huge users of both Skype and Macs), I can say that…
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Update on Phono, a jQuery plugin to simply add voice/chat to your web app: More tutorials, videos, available…
Continue Reading: Update on Phono, a jQuery plugin to simply add voice/chat to your web app: More tutorials, videos, available…Have you played yet with Phono, the new way to add a phone or chat client to your web app, directly from within your web browser? Two weeks ago, when Phono was announced at the jQuery conference in Boston, I wrote about how Phono lets you “rewire the real-time web”. In the time since, the Voxeo Labs team and I have been busy cranking out tutorials, videos and blog posts showing how people can build cool apps with Phono. A page is now up summarizing many of the new resources at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/news/phono/
If you have no idea what Phono is all about, that page also provides a great way to learn more. There are sample applications like “Facebook Telephone” and “Twelephone” for Twitter. There’s a “Kitchen Sink” example that you can use to get started right away… the Phono Blog, too, is filled with ideas and new ways to add voice or IM to your website or web application, including a WordPress plugin that lets you add a “Call” button to your WordPress blog
It’s all cool stuff, to me… and interesting because it makes it even easier to connect people to your company or organization from your website. My…
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Asterisk SCF: Scalability, Extensibility, Performance
Continue Reading: Asterisk SCF: Scalability, Extensibility, PerformanceThe big news coming out of Astricon last week in DC was the “Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework“, a.k.a. “Asterisk SCF“. The main goals of the project are to bring to the Asterisk platform:
- Scalability (and high availability)
- Extensibility
- Performance
As a long-time fan of Asterisk (and user/administrator at various points of time), I can agree that all of these are areas where the base Asterisk IP-PBX can use some help.
Asterisk SCF is NOT a replacement for Asterisk. Instead it is essentially a framework for extending Asterisk and adding new functionality. As the executive summary outlines:
Asterisk SCF is designed as a distributed system of components that can be deployed in clusters on a single system or on many systems, transparently. Implementing Asterisk SCF as a cluster of small components allows it to naturally take advantage of the ever-wider multi-core CPUs being produced today as well as the movement to off-site or cloud-based computing. In addition, all operational data elements required by Asterisk SCF’s components are themselves managed by their own Asterisk SCF components, allowing for active/passive failover models with no disruption of service. The design also ensures active/active failover and load-sharing models can be supported. These design elements…
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Want to speak locally about Tropo.com voice/SMS/IM/Twitter mashups? Here’s some free gear..
Continue Reading: Want to speak locally about Tropo.com voice/SMS/IM/Twitter mashups? Here’s some free gear..If you have become a fan of Tropo.com for creating applications that use voice, SMS, IM and Twitter and want to speak about Tropo to a local user group, meetup, BarCamp, WordCamp or other event, the Voxeo Labs team has put together a pretty cool “meetup kit” that you can request (for free) for your next event. It’s got some T-shirts, stickers and even some USB drives.
The Tropo blog post has info about how to request a kit.
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A Brief Primer on the Tech Behind Skype, P2PSIP and P2P Networks
Continue Reading: A Brief Primer on the Tech Behind Skype, P2PSIP and P2P NetworksWhat is an overlay network? What’s a DHT? How does a node compare to a supernode? What differentiates a “pure” peer-to-peer (P2P) system from a “hybrid” system?
UPDATE: Unfortunately, this post is no longer accurate with regard to Skype’s infrastructure. After the massive Skype outage in December 2010, it was expected that Skype was exploring ways to make their system more stable and resilient. In early 2012, Skype (at that point now owned by Microsoft) was reported to have replaced much of the P2P supernode infrastructure with supernodes hosted in Microsoft data centers. Since that time we’ve understood that additional changes have been made for resiliency’s sake. Given all that, it’s hard to know exactly how Skype’s infrastructure exists today. This article below does, though, provide some background into the basics of peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure.I have a series of posts planned over the next few weeks related primarily to Skype and some of the changes brought about in Skype 5.0 for Windows that are interesting from a technology point-of-view – but in order to write those posts, I need to build a bit of a…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…