By tradition, Skype concentrates on voice and video calls but with the rise of smartphone apps, Microsoft began to transition to the new design of Skype that now targets instant messaging. For those who haven’t heard that much about this calling and messaging platform, this took over MSN Messenger and has picked up some updates recently to offer a more developed, highly reliable chat experience across different devices.
Microsoft now makes available its fresh new look for the messaging platform for Mac and Windows and if you have already seen the new design of Skype for the interface of iPhones, this latest version will look and feel the same.
One of the big changes made on Skype is its bubble-style chat design with thumbnail images of contacts and bold chat icons as well as for audio and video calls. It is now more consistent with its overall look for clients using mobiles that run on Android, Windows Phone and iOS operating systems and brings with it some improvements on chats. The photos will now be showed inline and the user interface on Windows clients has been cleaned up to get rid of spacing between chats and contacts.
Another big change that comes with the new design of Skype is its file sharing. It is also improved using relevant icons for various types of documents like PDFs and Word to make it easy for the user to locate attachments within a chat conversation.
However, the biggest changes to the free messaging service come with its daily use. The service for Mac allows the user to already share messages or photos even if he is still engaged in a call. It was hard to work around the user interface before but it has been fixed already and now it allows for seamless shift from one aspect of the software to another.
For those who are interested in getting the new design of Skype in their devices, it has been launched for Mac already but the Windows Phone devices would still have to wait for it. As of this time, Microsoft is just previewing the design changes on the Windows operating system. Now if you’re using Mac, you should seriously get the updated Skype design so that you can start calling, chatting and sharing files at the same time using just one screen.