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…