Hi there,

first of all, kudos to all the developers, great job!

I just installed Skype 1.4.058 on Ubuntu Feisty and it's working well as the freezings I was experiencing with 1.3 when using WiFi connection seem to be gone and audio is now excellent.

No major issues so far.

Only the Interface is looking a bit strange with the menubar missing but I understand this will come back in due time.

Just a few questions:
Dynamic version didn't work, I had to select the static package.

As for the recommended libraries and packages (glibc 2.4, sigc++ 2.0, Qt 4.2.x)
I could not find them in the repositories, have no idea what their content is and whether they are needed with Ubuntu Feisty or not. There seems to be no problem with them though.
Would be nice to learn more about them.

/P

You need tp install libqt4-gui for the dynamically linked version

Bingo!
that did the trick indeed. Thank you.

Live and learn...

/P

I'm on Feisty, too, and so far, Skype 1.4 Alpha runs fine. Of course the top bar should come back soon. And it's not possible to see the contact groups yet. But I like the preview of the contacts' photos and messages. Also, the recent chats history has been improved.

The top menu bar isn't currently planned to come back. Are there things from this menu that you specifically miss? I know people have noted the ability to toggle offline users, and this will come.

As for Contact Groups, these will come back also, but I don't have a definite timeframe for this as yet. We have a couple of plans here. Can people from other platforms please let me know if they prefer the Linux 1.3 style grouping over the latest Windows clients?

Thanks,
Andrew.

I am also a Mac OSX user.
Although at first the new GUI in Linux was feeling a bit strange, I realize you have replicated the same interface already available on the other platforms.
So not a big deal for me the missing menu bar, I guess people just have to get used to it.

As for the other details, I consider that's just a matter of polishing what you have done so far, adding some extra features that could be useful. But the foundation looks solid now.

Well done!


/P

I really prefer the Windows style grouping.
As for the top menu bar - farewell, dear bar! R.I.P.

I don't like windows grouping, because as far as I saw there is no possibility to view all contacts but still view grouped people, in other words you can only filter by group and not view all users ordered by group.

I like 1.3 behaviour.

Some suggestions :

When i press the button "Call ordinary phones" I expected to get a tab with the usual digits buttons, instead of that I have a dialog box telling me that i can call phones by entering the number in the box above the contact list. Right now, i don't really see the point of this button except letting me think that I would have a phone interface when pressing it.

When i call a normal phone i'd like to get this screen with the numpad, for example when you call a hotline you often have to enter more numbers, press # or * while the call is in progress, and i think it's better to get them on the screen rather typing on the keyboard (although i think both key typing and screen clicking should be available)

When I click on a contact, it expands and some more info/options are available, to fold this, i can click under my contact list in the blank area, but if I have too much contact I won't have any possibility to fold the contact... Maybe a little button on the right of the contact to fold it should be useful.

I noticed that when i click on "Call ordinary phones" there is a fugitive window which appear for 1/4th of seconds and then i get the message telling me to enter the number in the dialogbox. Bug ?

We cannot call a contact which is not yet in our contact list (I only tried with "echo123") this is useful when making a first call

on the bottom on the window, the number of users connected is 0, I guess this is a bug since skype is very proud to announce anytime a new million is reached

When no contact is selected, it would be nice to get a right-click menu when clicking in a blank area of the contact list like "add contact, call phonelines, options, ...)


In the options menus :
notifications tab, the feature execute a script on event is very nice ! (I already made scripts to play/pause amarok when incoming call and ending call events). However we have to fill ourself the path to the script, a little button to open a window and browse through our files to select the script would be nice. . For the rest of this Notifications, don't change anything, the "test event" is very useful to test my script

Sound devices : "make a test sound" button is greyed... whatever the sound device selected is.

Hope that helps.

Yes, you guessed it. It is coming.



Ctrl+Click



This means you do not have the test sound .wav file installed. Make sure you have sounds directory from tarball uncompressed to /usr/share/skype/sounds.


As for the other tips - we will take a look into it. If you could file all them as separate bugs in our public bugtracker, it would be really superb.

Right, my fault, I had uncompressed the sound in /usr/share/skype/sound (without the final s at sounds)

I'll do it.


Thanks for the reply.

hands up for the developers, I never thought that we would see the light of a new linux version so I'm really really happy with this new alpha code

some great improvements I noticed:

1) You can choose a sound device for ringing, I have a cyberphone K phone wich I hardly noticed ringing, now I use my speakers for this ... SWEET no more missed calls!

2) More great stuff with this cyberphone K, when finishing a call and placing the handset back in it's cradle the call gets disconnected automatticaly just like with the voipvoice software in windows

3) I really like the elpased time of the conversation in the seperate window when minimized, verry handy!

4) I have lousy eyesight and use the high contracst inverse theme with gnome (black bg with white fonts). With 1.3 this theme didn't worked on skype, with 1.4 the theme also works on the skype UI, (Qt probably?)

5) Voicemail integration.. HOORAY!! (I have skype pro but never could use the voicemail with my account)

some bug i noticed:

When closing the skype window the program sometimes exits and doens't stay in the upper right panel of my feisty install, when restarting the program you can't login untill you search and kill the old skype process

But for an alpha release this is quite stable stuff and I really like where this release is going. I'm still wishfull thinking of SMS support in 1.4 but anyho atleast it's going to get in someday (like video support).

So thank you, it's really nice you guys are opening up to the community and make release cycles faster. I hope I soon can do the same with my linux client as my windows contacts.