This is a copy of a mail I have just sent to Skype:

Mac platform betas getting worse

I would like to know what has gone wrong with your mac development team. I've been a long time Skype user, in fact I have evangelised your service to friends, now your customers, because I was so impressed with your service. Of late however, the betas you are putting out are just horrible. 2.6.0.182 was simply unusable, very unstable (if a contact came online it would crash, when Skype Out connected it would crash, a piece of garbage really). The current version - 2.6.0.184 is not quite so unstable, but sound quality is awful, and the Skype phone I purchased 15 months ago, and which worked flawlessly with earlier betas, is now a pain to use because Skype takes over the audio input and keeps switching it down to minimum for some reason, making it inaudible at the other end. In system preferences you can see this happening - I drag the slider up to an acceptable level, and Skype pulls it back down again making the simple business of a phone call an exercise in stress management at both ends! Having just completed such a call, I just clicked on the open browser (Firefox) and that crashed - you are putting out sub-standard software, it's supposed to be beta not alpha, and I would like to know what is going on. Do you have a quality control department?

In my experience when betas go backwards it is a sign that the developers are no longer bothering with it, time to look for alternatives. I don't know if your purchase by e-Bay is anything to with this, if some corporate executive has decided to abandon the Mac platform (a pretty foolish move if that was the case as the platform is expanding rapidly), or whether it is just sloppiness in your dev team, but this is simply unacceptable. VOIP is a maturing market, competitors are coming on stream, and although I have no desire to abandon Skype if you do not get your act together I will be left with no choice.

I should point out that this is only audio, I have no webcam and hence do not use video. At the very least you should leave the latest usable beta available on your site, as many do, as I do, overwrite the old version with the new. I want some software I can use people, come on! Running OS 10.3.9 btw, and I will be posting this mail on both MacUpdate and VersionTracker to warn others of your current mac malaise.

Please get your act together.

Sincerely,

As the comments below point out, there are a number of different ways to manage and access fonts, but I think this simple piece of freeware has a place. I have an older machine (iMacG4 800) and find most font apps slow to the point of distraction, including Font Book, or the other one I use FontDoc, which takes several minutes to start up. If I am in Photoshop and want to select a font, this app does the job perfectly. It opens in an instant, has a tiny CPU and RAM footprint and lets me quickly go through my library to find the one I want. Yes that is a niche use, but it fills my niche perfectly! Thanks to the dev.
Slightly naff icon mind you!

Yes there are other utilities that fulfil this function, but this is definitely the most psychedlic app on my hard drive! I think it's lots of fun, it's a Mac thing don't ya know! Thanks Mr Developer!

An absolutely wonderful menu bar extra! Very Mac-like, clean, uncluttered and superbly functional. Kudos to the developer.
Version 1.2 runs perfectly on 10.3.9 for me.

When I try to open the app I get the following error message:

Uncaught exception in main method: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: util/ExampleFileFilter (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

iMac (PPC), 10.3.9; Java 1.42

That's what I call a responsive developer! Do you still want the crash log for 1.9, or have you superceded that with 2.0?
1.8, as you stated, works fine by the way.