Disruptive Telephony

Are you a Mac OS X user trying to learn to live with the new Skype 5.x user interface? Would you like to learn some great shortcuts for working faster with Skype 5?

While the Skype 5.x interface has certainly come under fire from many folks (including me), the reality is that it is the direction Skype is going forward with and so to a certain degree we who want to continue to use Skype have to either learn to live with the new UI - or revert back to Skype 2.8 while realizing we won't get any new features.

Recently my corporate laptop was upgraded to a brand new MacBook Pro and in the process I decided to finally make the jump over to Skype 5.2. In doing so, I started hunting around for ways to work even faster with the user interface. Thankfully, the folks at Skype came out with this great list of 12 tips:

Skype 5.2 tricks and tips

It turned out I knew most of them (or other ways to do them), but the one I have found very useful was the three-finger swipe on the trackpad to move up or down between conversations.

And the 13th tip?

That would be my own that isn't on that page. Being a huge Skype chat user, I like to quickly be able to find and jump into various chats. While in the Skype UI, hold down:

Option + Command + f

Your focus will jump up to the search box in the upper right corner and you can type in the name of someone or some text that is in a chat name. You should see the search results start to appear below. Hit the tab key to move down to the list of search results and then the arrow keys to move up and down in the list. Hit Enter to go into the chat ... and there you are.

Simple way to find chats... without having to use the trackpad. It's a shortcut that I use pretty much every day!

Are any of these tips major time savers for you? Have you found other tips or tricks that help make the Skype 5.2 UI work better for you?

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