This is our second in-house built audio codec especially designed for calls over the internet with superb quality. The Super Wideband Audio codec will help you most on lousy network conditions and when you have lower bandwidth available, although it also improves quality in normal conditions too.
In the Skype 4.x Discussion Public Chat Raul Liive goes on to say: "it's superior over SVOPC in every usage area, but it comes best out in the low bw or loose internet conenction cases". However, the legacy SVOPC codec remains available to address backward compatibility requirements.
Other new features include;
MySpaceIM with Skype (functionality carried over from 3.8)
Option to disable uPnP and Nat-PMP
eBay browser highlighter bundled
Added Philips SPC 1330 NC as High Quality Video camera
along with an improvement in the Instant Messaging layout and numerous bug fixes listed in the release notes.
As I am at CES where my laptop still has the last released version 3.8 of Skype for Windows in order to access features such as Public Chat creation, I will not be able to try this hotfix out until I return home this weekend (where my desktop has the 4.0 beta 3). But if you have a PC running the beta version, it's definitely worth checking out this hotfix. I am curious to see if they also fixed the "flashing technical call info" problem.
Obviously feedback about :"hidden mysteries" should go back to Skype's forum for reporting issues; however, if you have experience with the new codec, tell us about it in the Comments.
Tonight out at the "ShowStoppers" event at MacWorld in San Francisco, Skype announced the new 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X. The new version will apparently be available for download tomorrow, January 6, 2009, from Skype's website. [NOTE: I will update this post with the download link when it becomes available.]
Continuing Skype's rather fragmented product strategy, they have rolled out some new features in this 2.8 beta release that will at least stop us Mac users from whining about Windows users always getting the good stuff first. Here's the quick list of what Skype notes is in this release:
Skype Access
Screen Sharing
Improved chat management: ability to sort chats in the drawer and set priorities to chats
Quick Add: much easier to add people to chats
Mood message chat: mood message updates from your friends as chat messages
Large avatars: 256x256 pixels
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
Ability to add your own notes to contacts
Courtesy of Skype's PR team, I've had a chance to play with the 2.8 beta for a couple of weeks and have these thoughts below...
SKYPE ACCESS
Probably the largest "new" feature is "Skype Access", a service that lets you go to any of the 100,000 Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots and - using Skype - connect to the Boingo hotspot. When you connect, you pay on a per-minute basis and the fee (roughly 20 cents per minute) is deducted from your Skype Credit. You do not have to pay the Boingo monthly fee. You do not have to pay any hourly or daily fees.
Judging from the news release and pre-release info, Skype is immensely proud of this feature but I will be honest and say it does little for me. I just don't use Wi-Fi hotspots as much while traveling (especially now that I'm paying for a wireless broadband adapter). However, I can see how this could be of value. If all you wanted to do was crack open your Mac and send some email, this gives you a great way to do that on a per-minute basis. If I were a heavy user of Wi-Fi hotspots, I'd want to do the math to figure out if it would just be cheaper to buy a monthly Boingo access.
Regardless, it's an interesting move for Skype to get into the business of connecting you to Internet access.
SCREEN SHARING
The coolest feature of the 2.8 beta is a "screensharing" feature where you can share either your entire screen or just a portion of your screen with the Skype user on the other end. Now, this works with all other versions of Skype because it replaces your video stream with the screen sharing. So a Mac Skype user can share their screen with Windows and Linux users.... which is pretty cool.
It's hard to show in a blog post, but if you watch my screencast about the 2.8 beta, you can see it in action:
You can share either your entire desktop or just a section of your screen. You can also resize the section you are sharing while you are in the middle of sharing. When you stop sharing, you just flip back to showing your video.
CHAT PRIORITIZATION
By far the most useful feature I've found in the 2.8 beta is the ability to set the "priority" of a chat session - and then sort your chat sessions by priority in the Mac's "drawer" way of displaying chat sessions. I can just control-click a chat (either a private or public chat) and then go down to the "Set Priority" menu choice:
You can then sort the chats based on their priority using the drop-down menu at the top of the "drawer":
You can also sort based on title or date. Personally I've found the Sort by Priority to be very useful when you have, as I do, a zillion chats open at any one time. (And yes, I report to RJ, our CTO, so his chat gets the highest priority! ;-) )
MOOD MESSAGE CHAT - AND FOLLOWING (like Twitter)
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 2.8 beta is the new "Mood Messages" pseudo-chat that you can enable in the Advanced part of the Skype Preferences:
Once you enable the "Mood Message Chat", you get a new chat window that opens up that shows you the mood messages of all of your contacts:
It also very nicely lets you set your mood message simply by typing in the window as you would to any other chat window. This is quite nice for someone like me who almost never changes my mood message in the regular window.
This actually makes Skype mood messages useful to me.
However, because of that other option that says "Show iTunes song in my mood message", you rapidly wind up seeing that a whole lot of people have that option checked and your Mood Message Chat rapidly fills with updates of music people listen to. What if you don't want to see their updates? Well, Skype has made it so that you can "follow" updates from your contacts through a simple menu choice:
The down side here is that if you enable the Mood Message Chat, you are following all your contacts by default and have to go through and "unfollow" (i.e. uncheck the menu choice) people you don't want to follow. It would be great if Skype had a "follow by default" or a "stop following all contacts" choice... something along those lines to let you control who you are following.
The intriguing aspect here is that this enables you to turn Skype mood messages into the kind of status updates that you typically have in Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other zillion services offering status updates. The great thing here is that it is simply another Skype chat window like all your other chats. (Of course, you can get a Skype chat for Twitter using "twitter4skype", but this is now with Skype mood messages.)
I think, though, for it to reach any kind of real usage, you need more people to enable this feature (it is off by default) and actually start using it - and for that it also needs to be on more platforms.
[As a tease, I'll mention that there is a way to integrate this mood message chat with Twitter, so anything I type there also shows up in my Twitter stream... but I'll write about that in a separate blog post as it's not directly tied to the 2.8 beta release. Soon...]
QUICK ADD
Another nice feature is the ability to quickly add someone to a chat through a button at the top of the chat window. You click on the window and start typing in a contact's name:
Before you could always drag-and-drop a contact from your main Skype window into a chat, but now you can use this quick add button. It is particularly useful if you have a large number of Skype contacts.
NOTES ON CONTACTS
Another useful feature is the ability to add private notes to each of your Contacts. So you could store information about how you know the person... their interests... basically anything you want as it is a free-form text field:
What's not yet clear to me is where these notes are stored. Are they accessible through multiple Skype clients if you were logged in on multiple machines? Or are they tied to the machine where you create the Notes? I'm guessing that they are stored with the local client like chat histories are.... but I'd need to have multiple installations of the 2.8 beta to really know this.
OTHER FEATURES
Skype also added a few other features:
New set of icons
Large avatars: You can now have images up to 256x256 pixels in size.
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests - so you aren't exposed to images that might be offensive.
There are undoubtedly other features that we'll find as we work with it more.
CONCLUSION
So with this 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X, Skype provides some interesting new capabilities. I can see the screen sharing being quite useful to show people what's on my screen. The chat prioritization is great for heavy chat users like me. The possibilities of actually making the Mood Messages useful intrigue me. Frequent Wi-Fi hotspot users may find the Skype Access feature useful and economical.
All in all, it's a great evolution of the Skype client for Mac OS X.
I do wish, though, as I've discussed before, that Skype's product strategy weren't so fragmented. Sure, as a Mac user, it's fun for a few minutes to have some features that Windows users don't have... but that fun rapidly fades when I can share my desktop with a Windows user but they can't share their's. And they almost never use the Mood Messages because it's not convenient to do so.
Perhaps most annoyingly, I am currently in a position where I am helping some Windows users get started with Skype and so I'm trying to help them with their Skype client... when mine is markedly different. It's a frustrating experience. I do hope Skype's new management can help converge the product streams so that the user experience (and technical support experience) is closer between platforms (while, yes, acknowledging that platforms have UI/behavior differences). We'll see.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy using this new beta on my Mac and seeing what else might be inside the release.
Again, Skype indicates that the 2.8 beta will be available tomorrow, January 6, 2009, for download for Mac OS X users.
I'll look forward to reading what you all think...
In my early 50's youth when I was delivering afternoon newspapers in somewhat remote Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I always tried to be at one customer's home at 4:30. Why? At that time the only television viewable came via high rooftop antennae from transmitters far away (~400 miles) near Minot, North Dakota. If atmospheric conditions were favorable my customer would let me watch half an hour of a kid's program (probably Howdy Doody); most of the time we got to watch it masked by a snowy blizzard of faint reception. Getting any type of television reception at that time and location was, at best, a challenge and an adventure.
Fast forward 55 years to this past week's 2009 New Years day afternoon. While riding as a passenger in our car, we sped along Ontario's main 401 freeway as I watched the CBC Sports color telecast of the third period of the NHL Winter Hockey Classic (live from Wrigley Field) on my BlackBerry Bold. It was one more test to carry out during the public beta of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry.
I viewed all the action in full color; equally as impressive was the quality of the stereo sound (which "swells" out well beyond the device). The only frame freezing probably occurred as my BlackBerry switched between cell tower sites. Otherwise I was experiencing a crisp picture with sharp colors and clear sound coming from my home cable TV box. Talk about convergence - a Rogers cable TV signal being transmitted back out over Rogers High Speed Internet to a BlackBerry Bold via Rogers 3G wireless.
I have provided the detailed basic requirements for using SlingPlayer for BlackBerry Mobile on my recent Web Worker Daily post: "A New BlackBerry Experience Goes Beta: SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry" along with a history of SlingMedia's hardware and software products. Note especially that it requires a version 4.5 firmware upgrade of any BlackBerry 8x20. While it works via a WiFi connection on all supported devices, over a 3G HSDPA network (Rogers, AT&T and T-Mobile in North America) it only works currently on the BlackBerry Bold.
Over the past 15 months I have been using SlingPlayer Mobile for Symbian on a Nokia N95-1 over WiFi connections. It has been a consistently reliable experience over that period; it also provided me with some benchmarks for testing the BlackBerry version's user interface and video/audio quality. Here are some of the experiences I have had with SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry on my BlackBerry Bold 9000 over the past few days of beta trials:
a rock concert on HDNet where percussion, guitar chords and voice cover a wide audio frequency range
a rebroadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas eve concert on PBS where over 200 voices, soloists and the orchestra provide an excellent source for testing the clarity of audio as well as the resolution of the video
several sports events, including fast moving football and hockey action as a test for shadowing and pixelation
Oprah Winfrey making Skype High Quality Video calls
In all cases the experience on the Bold took full advantage of the Bold's processor power, network speed, native stereo audio and its widely acclaimed "stunning" color display. Simply stated, I became immersed in the programs I was watching to the point where the experience was transparent to the underlying technology. My only negative was more physiological than technical: I found full "playing surface" views of sports events could cause a bit of dizziness due to focusing on all the action within the Bold's display size; holding the device further away from my eyes addressed this issue.
While I had some excellent viewing and listening experiences, a few comments:
instead of a full visual representation of the cable box remote control, the remote control buttons are represented on a menu bar across the bottom of the screen. Note that in addition to the icons on the menu bar, one can "fast-track" to an item using the keyboard (for instance, M=Menu, O=Power On/Off, etc.)
scrolling across any of the three menu bars is done via the BlackBerry's trackball.
audio comes out by default over the Bold's speakers without the need to click on the "speaker" button
the "Favorites" menu bar picks up your "Favorites" channels stored via SlingPlayer for Windows1
changing channels may cause a video freeze up for 10-20 seconds; this is an issue SlingMedia is trying to minimize.
no apparent viewing experience difference whether using either a WiFi or 3G connection
needs a bar to display volume level when using the BlackBerry's volume +/- buttons
switches readily between a full screen video and a display that incorporates one of three menu bars
needs to "reconnect" if you switch to another BlackBerry application while viewing (SlingPlayer application remains open in background but disconnects from the source); the "reconnect" time is 5 to 15 seconds.
battery life on the Bold for continuous reception of a broadcast via WiFi is about 2-1/2 to 3 hours.; it's probably shorter on other 8xx0 models.
I have also been able to get SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry beta working on a BlackBerry 8820 over WiFi where, once again, it provided an excellent true reproduction of the video signal within the limitations of the 8820's video and audio hardware.
it can also be used to operate the PVR on my cable TV set-top box.
latency: at midnight New Year's Eve, SlingPlayer for BlackBerry Mobile rang in the new year seven seconds after the broadcast version directly connected to a cable service.
you can almost read those real time scoreboard bars that appear across the top of the screen during football and hockey broadcasts.
And, for now for those not able to take advantage of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry due to its current specifications:
it works over a GSM/EDGE connection on unsupported BlackBerry 8xx0 devices; however, SlingMedia does not guarantee the resulting performance. This is really an application for 3G or faster wireless networks only; an attempt to connect my Bold in a rural area where there was only EDGE wireless failed.
once SlingMedia releases this HSDPA version of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry they will look at doing a version that runs over Verizon's, Bell Mobility's and Telus's 3G EV-DO network
A suggestion for RIM: SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry demonstrates the full potential of the Bold's and 8900 Curve's 480x320/360 video display. Let's hope that newer versions of their firmware can achieve the same level of high quality video on the YouTube player and other video applications supported by these devices.
If you have both a SlingBox and one of the supported BlackBerries, upgrade your firmware (where necessary) and give SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry a try (U.S., Canada, U.K.). Sling Media is now looking for feedback from its targeted user public.
With over 500 channels to choose from, at any location worldwide where I can find a WiFi or (unlimited data plan) 3G HSDPA connection, television broadcast viewing has come a long way from having, in a fixed location, a single channel available only when atmospheric conditions permit.
SlingPlayer for BlackBerry has significant potential for business road warriors; in addition to the entertainment aspect, it also provides immediate access to "breaking news" and business broadcasts from taxis, airports, coffee shops, restaurants (mind your etiquette, however). For those states considering legislation prohibiting texting while driving, they may also want to include viewing videos as a potential distraction.
(I would have put up a screen capture; however, the video does not make it to the BlackBerry screen capture programs I employ, including PC desktop programs.)
1SlingMedia's remotely stored "Favorites" feature will be supported by a future version of SlingPlayer for Mac.
We have just learned that Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 3 is now available. Once we have had a chance to install and review it, there will be more to say. But for now:
change: Extras Manager updated to version 2.0.0.65
change: Removed AMR-WB audio codec
Remember this is a beta release and should not be used in "mission critical" situations where you require the full Skype 3.8 for Windows feature set. Check it out and provide your feedback to Beta Feedback, Skype Forums or the Jira public issue tracker or in comments to this post below.
Skype is changing the way users download and install software.
Starting with your next full update to Skype 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows, you'll download a quick 2.5MB "light installer." It will then download the full Skype client, around 24MB. From the Skype FAQs:
"It manages the download for you so if you have any hardware or network issues, the download can be resumed. It serves the purpose of a download manager for Skype, allowing pause/resume and recovery from failures. It also gives information about features as it is downloaded and installed."
This is a common strategy.
Users get more immediate gratification from downloading (about ten times faster) and a greater sense of control over installation.
Skype gets more and better information about the desktop to configure what gets downloaded and from where.
UPDATE: Pondering that last point… What will the experience be for TOM-Skype users? Will they be given a choice of clients (monitored/filtered vs. private/free) at first download? at update?
Wednesday, October 1, the second beta release of Skype 4.0 for Windows will become available for worldwide testing. Via a mix of the Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 1 feedback channels involving legacy users and new users, bug reporting and usability issue forums and direct surveys that resulted in over 45,000 participants' responses and feedback, Skype learned:
70% were in favor of the new "large desktop" user interface; about 30% wanted to return to the traditional compact user interface.
users were looking for improved means of organizing contacts by groups
relative to pre-Skype 4.0 beta 1 surveys, increased awareness of the multi-modal features of Skype such as IM, file transfer and SMS.
there existed problems with how IM presented itself to the new user
users were missing Instant messages and other events due to a lack of appropriate notification procedures
increased conversions rate to paid Skype subscriptions
As a result Skype 4.0 beta 2 includes:
user choice of a default "large desktop" view or a compact view
organization of contacts by categories with several default categories (the term "Groups" now refers to a multitude of users within a conversation such as in a Group Chat, Public chat or on a multi-party call)
new drop down menu to select "Categories" from the "Contacts" tab
new algorithms for message and missed call notification, with the initial notification coming via a tag on the Skype System Tray icon so as not to make the notification activity overwhelming
a new way to display a selected Contact's information when in a call or chat session
several options for resizing the user information, the video images, the chat area of a conversation, etc.
entry of PSTN phone numbers into a Contact's information on your local PC for those Contacts who have not included these phone numbers in their Skype user profile: mobile, home, office, other.
Skype for Windows Product Manager Mike Bartlett has prepared a video to demonstrate some of the new features:
And you can download Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 2 here.
Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 2 has the same caveat as we issued for Skype 4.0 Beta 1: this is beta software, there will be bugs and may even be usability issues. This is your opportunity to provide feedback. It is still missing some features of Skype 3.8, the last officially released version of Skype, such as Call History and creation of Public Chats. Do not use it as your primary Skype interface, especially if you depend on Skype for business or professional communications. I am still running Skype 3.8 on my laptop; I run Skype 4.0 Beta on my desktop PC.
Phil will be posting tomorrow with more details on his experience.
Check out Alec Saunders comments. And Mike Bartlett appeared as the featured guest on the October 1, 2008 SquawkBox. Click on the link to access the recording.
We asked about any upcoming Skype for Mac; the response was along the lines of (i) the Mac group is also examining the feedback from the Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 1 for ideas to incorporate and (ii) when a new version does come along it may have some features that are not available on Skype 4.0 for Windows.
Hint: to activate the Contact Categories feature, go to Contacts | Contact Categories | See All Contact Categories.
What follows is a very rough and partial transcript of the first half of the interview, starting after generic introductions. Spelling, typos, omissions, and other errors are all mine. Corrections and additions welcome.
Om: eBay Synergy?
Josh: "Our mission is enabling the world's conversations. We aspire to be is the world's leading communications software company."
Josh: "I think that the communications industry is going through one of the great sea changes of our time. And we'll look back ten years from now at this moment in time and say this is the time when communications transitioned from being hardware to being software.
What i mean by that If you cast your mind back ten years ago, you'll remember that dedicated appliance you had called the telephone. and it was purpose built for voice and it was tied to a network that was purpose built for voice.
if you think about the world we live in today we use these multipurpose computing devices, i don't know about you, maybe 5% of my time on this is spent with voice communications. i do all kinds of other communications with it. if you look at the iPhone, it's not even a communications device. you're checking stock prices or the Internet, watching movies and listening to music. one of the applications you use on that device is around communication.
so communications moved from hardware to software.
it's now part of every device and every device is connected to a multipurpose network called the Internet.
so what that means for consumers is massive amounts of innovation, making communication richer and fuller.
again, going back to when communication was embedded in the hardware, it was only voice. now, if you think about the spectrum of communications, it goes all the way from very short twitter-like communications, in our case we call them mood messages, to chat, to voice, to video, to file transfer and online collaboration; a whole set of different modes you want to talk in, all tied together by some common services. for example one common address book, a common set of presence. and what consumers want and need is that core set of services to follow them from device to device everywhere they are.
we think Skype is uniquely well positioned to capitalize on that. in fact we think that is the future.
just like the train industry did not invent the airplane, the telephony industry is not going to invent the communications business of the future.
Om: I wrote about ten of the telephone companies getting together and building their own client. What do you make of that?
Josh: We welcome competition from all sources.
Om: If you were a betting man, when would you bet will they release a product like that?
Josh: the phone companies have not been known to be world class at building software. when ten of them get together the odds go down a lot.
the great thing about communications being in software is this is going to be a massively competitive industry. and when it's massively competitive the consumer wins.
what we need for that to happen is we need open networks.
and the world that North America lives is in today, where the carriers control the device you can use and the software you can load on the device, consumers are losing big time.
Om: I wouldn't go that far. That's Skype's argument. I don't buy that. Although I agree we're are living in a country where competition is scarce, and where it's almost like an emerging economy as far as broadband and IP networks are concerned.
Being married to eBay seems like a big mismatch.
...
Josh: One of the interesting things about the communications space is that it is very balkanized. cable providers against the fixed line against the wireless. and any camp you join makes as many foes as it does friends. one of the really unique things about eBay is within eBay umbrella I'm a totally neutral camp, i can work with everybody.
Om: why not just go public? spin it out of eBay? you are profitable, you've got revenues, you have customers, your are growing business like crazy. why not a standalone company?
Om: What should we as consumers be excited about?
So there's three things we're focused on right now at the highest level. Product innovation, paid services, and platform.
On the product innovation side I'd highlight a couple of things.
Skype was not the first company to do voice over the Internet, it was just the first one to make it really easy. while Skype is very easy to use, it's not easy enough. and so a lot of the innovation you should expect from us is making it even easier and even more reliable.
Another big area of focus in product innovation is going to be around video.
Video is going to be the dominant form of communication. now i don't mean that that all calls will be video calls. i think voice and chat will be table stakes and people will make the decision around which application to use based on who delivers the best, most reliable, highest value video experience. so we think video is a great source of differentiation for Skype.
On the paid services side, we have some great paid services. They're just not particularly well marketed. A lot of our users don't know we have them, we haven't named them well, we haven't described the what the value proposition is well. When people find out about them, they're delighted. We just haven't done a good job. So I think there's a lot we can do just to market our current products and services better and bring some new and exciting ones to market.
The last thing I talked about is platform. Skype has historically been a relatively closed community. now, we have created an api that has about 15000 partners working with Skype to build their capabilities into Skype. there's a massive ecosystem of people who want to build Skype into their products and services, from hardware providers who want to build Skype into flat panel televisions or cordless phones to software providers and web sites who want to build Skype in. and we should be working with all of those, we can't win if we're working with all of them one off, so we need to have a really robust platform. obviously, the within platform the area of most importance needs to be mobile.
This is a great start. Let's explore this further.
The new Skype for Windows 4 beta consolidates all the elements of a chat into one vertical pane on the right side of the main Skype window.
The upper half shows an alphabetic list of participants in a multiparty chat or conference call. People in the room. What else can we know or do with people in a room?
You can hide the list, but what else could you do with that space?
Sorting compares/contrasts people in the room. Sort by:
Most recently contributed to the chat/call
Freshness/aging by participation
Mutual Availability
Of the times I'm online, what percentage is this other person also online?
Time zone, relative to yours
When are the Australians waking up, rejoining the conversation?
Contacts vs. strangers
Which of these people have I yet to befriend?
Provocateurs, Amplifiers, Lurkers
Who triggers threads vs. who jumps in? Look at Marc A. Smith's research on mining Usenet for social network and relationship data. You can look at time gaps in conversation, followed by responses.
Visualize participation volume
Who has been most/least active? Show a chart (pie chart?) or meter of the number of words contributed to the chat or seconds spoken in the conference call. Acknowledge contribution, encourage the quiet to jump in.
Other profiled demographics: country, age, gender.
What other info would be useful if I move my mouse over someone's name in the panel? Hover information:
Faces
Mood text
Last text contribution to the chat
Show the contextual menu now shown by option/right-mouse clicks.
Other options:
Slide show of profiles, rotating through the participants
Highlight people who contributed recently in other chats in which we are both members
Help those in the room make the most of being in that room. Help us with the metawork of scheduling, the facilitation and moderation of the conversation, launching sidebar talk, building reputation through social grooming and participation.
This morning Skype released a hotfix upgrade for Skype for Windows 4.0 beta 3 bringing in several new features but most significant is the introduction of a new "super wideband Audio codec; from the Skype Garage blog post linked above:
Tonight out at the "ShowStoppers" event at MacWorld in San Francisco, Skype announced the new 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X. The new version will apparently be available for download tomorrow, January 6, 2009, from Skype's website. [NOTE: I will update this post with the download link when it becomes available.] 
Join the Skype 5.X Text Chat Room