Jul
25
I love Skype, but ever since they were bought by eBay it seems like they have been having a hard time getting the Mac client up to feature parity with the PC client. Well, looks like they have finally posted the official Skype for Mac with video preview. Of course it is a preview so we can expect bugginess to ensue, but at least we can play with it. Now if they could only add Skypcast support… Oh well, I’ll take the features as I can get them. Thanks Skype, I still love you.
Fantastic! I’m downloading it now. I had given up on video chat, but now I can live in hope…
Finally… I have my whole family in Europe, so now they can see me with my super-fancy MacBook PRO camera…
Now my investment of US$ 150 on my iSight of 3 years ago will come off age. It has been depressing so far not being able to use it for any good cross-platform conferencing.
I can chat with my family and friends worldwide now.
Himanshu
Sydney, Australia
I am trying this… I\’ve had the same feelings as Himanshu. (See my blog at http://www.avolio.com/weblog/pc2mac/). I fought a long time with iChat AIM. SightSpeed works well. I would try Skype if I knew anyone who used it.
Skype video on the Mac would be great if it worked, but the Mac preview version of Skype with video (1.5.0.52) is known by Skype to have a very high CPU load when in a call.
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/changelog.html
I’ve had a similar problem with processor usage on an iMac G5 2GHz 2GB running Skype 1.5.0.52 under MacOS 10.4.6 even when not in a call–simply activating my iSight firewire camera in the Skype video preferences window rapidly increases processor usage. When I close the video window processor usage drops back to normal.
Since Skype is aware of this problem, i wonder why they released such a flawed and unusable version even as a preview.
Screenshots documenting processor usage with video on and off are at
http://s115.photobucket.com/albums/n320/nsteinmetz/?action=view¤t=Skypevideooffscreenshot.jpg
and
http://s115.photobucket.com/albums/n320/nsteinmetz/?action=view¤t=Skypevideoonscreenshot.jpg