Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Skype and discoverability aka Resize Chat Message Width

For a while now I’ve been quite annoyed by how narrow the chat window is in Skype, especially when pasting code, exception logs, e.g:

image

Not very useful at times, especially given the real estate available, and this was only at 1366 horizontal resolution. Initial binging (and googling) turned up nothing, so I mentally filed it away in the (increasingly larger) pile of Things That Piss Me Off™.

Alas, today i went to vertically resize a non-skype related window that was hovering over skype. To my surprise I see a horizontal resize cursor rather than it’s vertical equivalent. Seems as though the chat width CAN be resized by grabbing the edges of the text entry field. The only indication that this is possible is the cursor change when hovering. Now, I understand that not everything can be discoverable, but to me this is a bit ridiculous.

Re-searching this turns out that other people have discovered this long before me. Unfortunately the size of my Things That Piss Me Off™ pile hasn’t decreased…

10 comments:

  1. This has been a thing that pissed me off too. I'm glad I found your page and solution. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great job describing the problem -- a good google search found it and now my satisfaction with Skype returns to "better than messenger".

    Nice work!

    ReplyDelete
  3. cheers mate. thanks for the solution. worked like a charm.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you very much. That is ridiculous indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ofc someone saw this problem and fixed it in the intervening years... On one of my monitors the text entry field border is next to impossible to see, requiring a double-take. The design isn't intuitive, who expects to drag out a text field! Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for this! However, I still wish one could make those other boxes smaller... :(

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks for this great revelation, have had this issue for weeks. Followed you suggestions and whamooo back to normal size. Thanks for sharing

    ReplyDelete