I've used this software with Snow Leopard and was very satisfied. It does its job perfectly. I've copied 140 GB of movies to a NTFS USB disc without any problems.

However it seems it doesn't work with Lion. Anyone has any idea?

Instead of upgrading to the new version, I am going to downgrade it. Being not be able to chat with someone else while videochatting is not user friendly.

Does it completely turn off the display?

Skype is very essential for me. I have lots of friends and my family in Skype, and neither iChat nor MSN messenger is usable for me. I linve abroad and I use Skype video call on daily basis, sometimes for hours.

Everybody knows the old version. It was slow at launch, fries the processor if you video call, and well, old, not updated for a long time.

New version is really quick to launch, requires less processor power.

I am not against single window application, in fact this is what Apple would like to do with Mac OS X Lion, or iPhoto, etc.

However it doesn't make sense to make such a terrible interface as a unified window. I really tried hard to convince myself and tried to approach to this interface, but it simply doesn't make sense!

I couldn't find a way of having full screen video chat as well. It is always in a window.

Now I can't decide between the beta 5.0 and 2.8 One of them is unusable (I am not saying ugly, ugly things can be usable), and the other one is very slow.

I hope they receive enough feedback about it.

This is the best AV chat solution for Mac and PC out there. It is very simple to use, it is not bloated, the interface is quite clean. If you need to make video chat, this is absolutely what you need.

However there are couple of things I really would like to mention:

1. It is long time not updated. I don't mean the extra stuff from PC version, however under the hood improvements would be very good. As far as I know Skype is using their own video compressing technology, however this video chat is very heavy duty for the computer. If you have a video chat, your fans will turn with full speed almost all time, and your battery drains amazingly fast if you are on a laptop. An improvement on processor usage would be awesome.

2. I very oftenly encounter with a strange behaviour while logging in. Maybe it is corrected in this version, but usually Skype is closed in my system. My partner sends me a message over Adium to open Skype, and we open our Skype's simultaneously. Although other people are online, both of us don't see each other. I "guess" that she is online and call her offline name, and voila! she is online at the moment and Skype call establishes.

3. Additional localizations would be a welcome addition as well.

Skype already announced that they haven't forgot Mac users, and a new version is expected until the end of this year. I hope they fixes the issues I mentioned above. Still though, nobody can beat this program if it comes to cross platform video chat.

I couldn't set any format at the preferences window. It doesn't show up anything at all. Is it a Snow Leopard issue?