I've been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years, and it took me forever to figure out how to make a simple SkypeOut call.

First, you press the large button with the eye-strainingly-small text "Call ordinary phones". It brings up a dialog with pretty number buttons, which one can thankfully ignore and just type in a numer. Press Enter--nothing. No warning, no beep, no call. Use buttons instead of typing. Nope. Add "1", nope. Finally, out of random tinkering I press the "International" button though I clearly have no intention of doing anything international, and voila! What that button really meant was "Choose a country, even if it's your own, and if you don't, I won't even give you any warnings, just quietly fail." Apparently they've spent hundreds of programmer-hours on those pretty flags and didn't have the 10 minutes of brain power needed to label the button correctly or write an error message. No, the selector doesn't default to your own country or put it at the top of the list. No, it doesn't remember what you chose last time. At least adding the number to your call list makes it tolerable the second time around.

Heh... Curmudgeons untie!

Another vote for getting the basics right. But maybe it's only old farts like us who give a damn...

Look, I apologise for the apparently difficult situation you have experienced with the Call Ordinary Phones feature. There were some last minute design changes, and this resulted in some implementation woes.

If you could outline what the country setting was set to before you selected International and an example of the number, I'll look into this specific issue a bit further as it sounds like you're experiencing more of a bug here than a design/usability issue.

Let's not jump to comparing brain sizes just yet.

Thanks,
Andrew.

I'm suspecting it is just a bug, totally not called for insults and such.

But you never make mistakes yourself, it's been 30 years in the industry already, right?

Add: Since you started 30 years ago, there were probably no web-based interfaces to bug trackers (and no bugtrackers even!), and you haven't learned how to use them since then. This is the only reasonable reason that you could not file a bug and went on with sarcastic vents into the forum.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know this sounds personal. I'm just mirroring back their attitude as an (probably negative) example. You do not need to point that out even if you think that you're smarter than me. Thank you.

Add: Since you started 30 years ago, there were probably no web-based interfaces to bug trackers (and no bugtrackers even!), and you haven't learned how to use them since then. This is the only reasonable reason that you could not file a bug and went on with sarcastic vents into the forum.

True, there wasn't a web or bug trackers when I started programming, but I have no problem using either (I wrote a non-web-based tracker once) I'll go looking for your tracker. I thought my post was in reasonably good humor, but I can understand if some might not have seen it that way.

I also happen to think that a forum posting is a perfectly reasonable way for users to report bugs. Why on earth would someone expect a random user to be able to use a bug tracker, or want to put them through the effort? That's the QA department's job. I'm just a user here, not a paid QA.

And as you are going for it, may I draw your attention to this still outstanding bug.

It might be part of the same set of routines and/or design/usability issues.

I duly reported it in May but it shows very little progress so far.

Thank you.

/P