Disruptive Telephony

I did have to glance out my window a few moments ago and check that there were no pigs flying across the sky... I also checked my calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fools... why?

Skype released an update for Linux!

As much as I may occasionally whine about how Skype doesn't give the Mac OS X client enough attention (or when they do, they don't get it right), I've got nothing to complain about compared to the folks living in Linux-land. If the Mac client gets "little" attention, the Linux client has appeared to receive almost "no" attention.

So it's good news that a "Skype 2.2 Beta for Linux" is now out. From the blog post it appears that the Linux client now has:

• Skype Access (ability to connect to WiFi hotspots using Skype credit)
• Support for call waiting and holding
• Improved audio/video quality in calls
• Support for easy conference call creation (also in the Windows and Mac 5.x clients)
• A whack of "improvements" to the user interface and functionality that sound individually like minor tweaks but together undoubtedly make it a more solid experience
• Over 50 various bugs (big enough to be mentioned)
• Updated support for about 20 languages

All in all it sounds like good bit of content and it's great to see Skype giving the Linux community some love with an update. If you run Skype on Linux, you may want to head over and check it out.

P.S. Of course, looking at the comments to the post, I can see that some in the Linux community are naturally looking for more... particularly a native-64-bit build. Hopefully with Skype's new emphasis on trying to get out more regular releases we'll see more Linux releases (versus the "1-beta-release-a-year" schedule they have seemed to be on).

Image credit: Antarctica Bound on Flickr

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