In my last coverage of the Skype beta client for Mac. In that posting I did note that it was now possible to buy access to WiFi networks with Skype credits - but only if you was using the Macintosh Skype client.

Now they have done it again in version 2.5.0.85 (and probably later).

WARNING: These features are EXPREIMENTAL. Do not come crying to me if doing any of this hose your computer or destroy your Skype settings.

Increased video resolution

Normal Skype Video is 320x240 - but with some tinkering it is possible to go up to 640x480. Personally I have not tested even higher resolutions and can not guarantee that they will work at the current point the release cycle.

This is not for the faint of heart, i.e. non-technical users. But if you edit the ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/yourskypename/config.xml.

Find the part of the file which contain:

XML:

Amed it into:

XML:

Twitter integration

If you did like I did, used a software like Moodblast to update status messages on your Twitter account, your Skype account, your Facebook account, your IM software, etc. You may now update your Twitter status from the Mood Messages now available in the Mac beta.

In the above metioned XML file, add the TwitterUsername and TwitterPassword tags with the corresponding values.

When doing a Mood Message update - this should now be posted to Twitter.

In my opinion, this is a nice feature if you are doing social chatting on Twitter and Skype. For business use with external parties I do not yet see the meaning of Mood Messages.

No more modal chat windows

I just do not like that all my chat windows are piled together. Actually - I would like to have a choice if I want the windows to be grouped togehter.

Now I can do that.

Code:

A few commentators have expressed that this does not look good, or fine, or happy. Personally I am less concerned about the looks as long as the functionality is there.

Extended search capabilities in the chats

Skype now let's you index your chats. This can of course take some time - and will eat some disk space. Until Spotlight understand Skype chats, this may be a good thing if you are chatting a lot on Skype.

To enable the extended search you need to first issue the command /mac indexchats in any chat windows.

When the indexing is over you can issue a /search search string to perform searches.

The search string does not have implicit wild carding enabled. You will have to use the *-meta character if you want to do wild card searches.

There is also support for logical grouping using parentheses, and support for boleas (AND, OR, NOT - also & | and !). Observe that the space character is a boolean AND.

As with Google - phrases is searched by enclosing the phrase with ".