Skype for Linux Hits Version 4.0 & Loses Beta Tag [Updates]

After more than 3 years of development, Skype for Linux has lost its beta tag and hit version 4.0. An update that landed on Thursday codenamed “Four Rooms for Improvement” sees the app catapult from version 2.2 to 4.0, closing the gap that had existed between the various desktop versions of the VoIP client.

If you have used Skype on Windows or Mac OS X recently then the changes won’t strike you as particularly new, but Linux users have been waiting a while for such an update. The Skype team have highlighted four main areas in which major improvements have been made, and they are:

A unified view for all text chats, rather than separate windows for each.
A brand new view for voice calls.
Improved audio quality.
Improved video quality as well as a wider range of supported cameras.

Version 4.0 is a big update seeing further improvements to stability, synchronisation between chats, load speeds and localisation as the Czech and Norwegian are added to the list of supported languages. The Skype team have advised users to be patient the first time they run the new version, noting:

“The very first time you start Skype for Linux 4.0 [it] might take a few minutes (depending on how lengthy your chat history is). Please do not close Skype during this time. Subsequent starts will load much more quickly.”

The new release is available for download from the Skype for Linux homepage, with versions available for 64 and 32-bit installs of Ubuntu and Debian, as well as 32-bit editions for Fedora and OpenSUSE.

Do you use Skype on Linux? What do you think of the new version? Let us know, in the comments below.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

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