Skype 4.0 - first impressions of some GUI and function changes

Tony Austin
Wednesday, 04 February 2009 15:23

IT Industry - Market

I was intrigued by the Call Quality button, since I had been affected by Skype call clarity quite a lot in the past (and have commented on in several of the earlier iTWire articles). See figure (2).

When you click on this button, you are presented with two options:  Learn about Call Quality, and Call Quality Feedback

When you select the top option (Learn about Call Quality) as shown in Figure (3), you expect tp be told all about the issues of call clarity and reliability and how Skype handles it.

What instead I got today, as shown in Figure (4), is another window opening titled Call Quality Guide, but it was completely empty! How did that get into this Skype 4.0 gold release? A quick fix is definitely needed here.

 

 Selecting the Call Quality Feedback option, shown in Figure (5), you get a panel where you can rate each call from very good to very poor. In previous Skype releases, this survey panel popped up after some calls and not others, and often not after a poor call so you could not predictably advise Skype about problem calls. Therefore this is a definite improvement.

I tried to find an option to change the background color of the main Skype window, as I had been accustomed to in Skype 3, but that option seems to have disappeared in Skype 4. Why so? Please bring it back, don't take away what you have earlier given!

A new option of to have what's called the Skype visual style, highlighted in yellow in Figure (6), with rather flat buttons as introduced in Windows Vista.

 

So I switched across to the "classic Windows" style shown in Figure (7), which goes well with Windows XP Professional.

I refuse to install my valid Windows Vista, mainly because I don't like its look and feel, and XP still works well enough for me. Will go for Windows 7 eventually, skipping Vista like many others.

So there we are, nothing groundbreaking, just a few passing observations.