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After Making Skype Convoluted and Difficult To Use, Microsoft is Now Rolling Out Features To Restore Simplicity (thurrott.com)
From a report: Microsoft just announced a number of changes the company is rolling out to restore Skype's simplicity and familiarity. When the company introduced the modern Skype, it introduced radical changes that turned the app into an actual, modern app. But of course, that didn't really work too well with some of Skype's classic users. Although Microsoft has made numerous changes to the modern Skype to work better for all users, there were still a bunch of things in the app that no one really needed. And one of that was Highlights -- it was a complete clone of Snapchat where you could post pictures/videos that last for a limited time. Unlike other Snapchat clones like Instagram Stories, no one actually used Skype Highlights. [...] The navigation has been drastically improved, now only consisting of Chats, Calls, and Contacts -- the three core parts of Skype. Along with Highlights, Microsoft's also removed the Capture button which opened the Skype camera -- another useless feature that was already accessible from within chats.
This is honestly Microsoft's biggest UI problem globally with all of their products. And hopefully I can say without getting blasted is why Apple killed the Phone and Tablet markets and Microsoft lost them.
Microsoft needs to expose a very simplistic UI to users, and let them click a "advanced mode" type of button to expose all the nonsense 99% of the users will never use. Fuck. Apple should do the same thing.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
1. Restore all the platforms they killed off after acquiring it. It was the defacto standard because it was everywhere. (Linux, tvs, etc)
2. Simplify the client
3. improve call quality. It's absolute garbage at work.
4. Lower bandwidth requirements by using some decent codecs.
5. Make screen sharing actually work on macs. You shouldn't have to reshare 3 times for everyone to see the damn picture.
6. Don't make skype for business a crappy Lync variant and restore the original skype client.
Just bring back the classic Skype UI, and take old Yeller (Skype for Business) out back and shoot it. Yes, I am still running 7.38.0.101 (classic UI, everything still works), but who knows how long that will remain supported?
New Skype removed many of the features of classic Skype (at least on Linux it sure did), but there were still a few features left. Now we're going to remove the rest of the features, and just for fun we're going to call the removal of features a feature!
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> and let them click a "advanced mode"
"Advanced mode" is always UI speak for "The thing you actually want to do". Let's take the browser I'm typing in for example. The only things I ever want to do in browser settings is (A) Mess with the proxy settings (B) Mess with the certificates and (C) Recover a stored password. Things I don't want to do include everything on the basic settings page of chrome. Everything I might want to do is behind the well obscured "advanced" button.
It's not just chrome. It's everything on Windows and Macs. Thunderbird, firefox, word, excel, skype etc. etc.
At least I have Linux and it's all in a dotfile in my home directory or etc.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
...remove features that everybody wants ...and then add them back and sell that as an improvement.
Now seriously: I hate the modern dumbing down of UIs. Yes, I understand they're geared towards non geeks and many also designed for touchscreens but at least give us the option to also have a "classic",dense, keyboard-and-mouste-optimized UI. And, at the very least have some way to configure the "advanced" options, even if it's something as ugly as Firefox's "about:config"
Serious question - what's the best replacement? I would love to move away from Skype, mainly because they have removed the ability to add a phone number to your contacts.
FaceTime is a beautifully simple interface that Just Works, provided that you're an Apple user calling another Apple user. Steve Jobs (peace be upon him) promised to open up the interface to all comers, but a patent troll called Virnetx hijacked the FaceTime implementation, forcing Apple to change the implementation to one that cannot be open-sourced.