Design vs. Develop

Once upon a time, Skype was a great way of doing free voice chat and making cheap international phone calls. I remember surprising and impressing European clients with a quick phone call to clear up things we had discussed over email. I also remember using it for quick 3-4 person meetings and encrypted (if basic) IM functionality.

However, it started to get annoying when people would assume that my status of “online” meant “ready to voice chat for 20 minutes.” Your only other settings were ‘away’, ‘busy’, and ‘not available’; none of these really communicated what I wanted to say. I usually was available for text chat, but very frequently didn’t have either the equipment or time for voice. It didn’t help that Skype’s default double click action was “start a voice chat.” I stopped leaving Skype on and only pulled it out for scheduled calls. Still useful software at this point, but a little annoying.

Somewhere along the line, they added group text chats. These are like IRC rooms, except that they’re invite only and you can scroll back. Helpful for when you want a private meeting room for a group of people. All is good, right?

Unfortunately, Skype’s idea for these is a little less permanent than the way people actually use them. If you get invited to one of these chats, you’re automatically added and a little window pops up the next time you log on. It will even pull up a good long history of the chat to date so you can see what people have been saying. However, in order to stay in the chat room, you must leave the window open. If you close the window, you’ve left the chat.

If you quit Skype without specifically closing the chat windows, all will be fine and they’ll be there when you come back. But if the conversation is running very quickly and you want to concentrate on work, you have to somehow hide or minimize it to get it out of the way. You can bookmark chats, but this only seems to save the conversation to date. There’s just no good way of leaving the chat temporarily and coming back to it later. Correction: Bookmarking the chats does save them (on your local machine only) so you can come back later.

Worse yet, your chat rooms are kept client side while the transcripts are seemingly kept server side. If I get invited to a chat, log into Skype with my laptop, my desktop will have absolutely no knowledge of this chat (even though I’m using the same account). Since the transcripts are already kept on the server, is it all that difficult to keep track of the chat rooms I’m in?

I hate Skype, but I’ll use it every once in a while if I absolutely have to. The software has gotten to the point where it’s too difficult to manage the distractions for it to be worth my while. If anyone out there has figured out how to fix the issues I’m having, let me know. In the meantime, Skype developers: can we get a way of keeping a list of group chats and can I get a “text only” status?