Skype on Thursday released a beta version of its video call feature for Macintosh users, a move designed to bring more people into a Skype community dominated by Windows PCs.
Skype for Mac 2.0 is designed to allow Skype users to make free Internet-based video calls to other Skype users who have a Macintosh or Windows system. The company has been working on a Mac video version of its voice over Internet Protocol service for a while, but it was not ready for prime time in July when Skype released the beta of Mac OS X 1.5, a voice-only version of the software.
"Our community is made up of both Mac and Windows users," Stefan Oberg, Skype's product management director, said in a statement. "We couldn't be more excited to bring these two groups together, literally face-to-face."
While video calls to other Skype users are free, calls to traditional or mobile phones will incur a charge.
Users of the Skype Mac video service will need Mac OS X, version 10.3.9 Panther or later, a system with a G4, G5 or Intel processor running at a minimum of 800MHz, 512MB of RAM and 40MB of free disk space.
In addition to the Mac 2.0 beta, the company also released the final version of Mac OS X 1.5.
I am a user of Skype on a few different distros of Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu and SuSE). The newest version has no trace of video on it and barely works, period. I don't know whether the Linux version of Skype is produced by the same people that produced the other versions. It looks very different and needs some updates and repairs before even conceiving a video option. Let's hope they can get it together. I would so much like to go fully Linux!
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