Disruptive Telephony

For those Mac users brave enough to step into the world of Skype 5.0 (or who inadvertently accepted the upgrade box that popped up), Skype has come out with Skype 5.1 for Mac OS X today. As Beom Soo Park notes on the Skype Garage blog, this release contains:

• Focus on active speakers in group calls
• Dial recently called numbers from dial pad
• Contact groups shown in on the right hand side, allowing more space in the side bar
• Call Quality Feedback
• Several minor bug fixes

All of it pretty much pointing it to being the minor "dot release" that it is. The Mac release notes have also been updated with the same information.

I will say that the removal of the Contact groups from the left sidebar is a huge benefit to me. The result is a MUCH more compact sidebar:

The contact groups have now been moved over to the top of the right window area (the "main" section), which works nicely.

Unfortunately once I clicked on a group, I could find no way to return to the full set of contacts (and I've raised a bug ticket with Skype on this).

UPDATE - 3/25/11: It turns out that to return to the full list of contacts, you simply have to click on the "group" named "Skype." My response in the ticket was that this is NOT intuitive (consider, for example, that I might have a group myself named "Skype"), but it is apparently how they have set it up.

The "Focus on active speakers in group calls" sounds like a useful feature/fix... but I don't honestly find myself using Skype for all that many group calls. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing this in action at some point.

In any event, those of you using Skype 5.x on the Mac can upgrade now... or will soon see an update notice.

P.S. Find anything else of value in the release?

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