Why Type When I Can Skype

Throw out Yahoo! Messenger, if you’re not using Skype, I’m no longer your “buddy” :P. I’ve tried voice chat before but nothing even as close to as good as this. I can’t believe I’ve never heard (pardon the pun) of it before.

I plugged my headphones in, “called up” a friend and starting speaking at my laptop (there’s a mic there somewhere though I’ve no idea where). The sound quality is astonishingly good. My friend might as well have been sitting next to me.

So I started calling up everyone I could. My brother travels a lot for work and has two kids and I figured it would be really useful for him. “brb (be right back)” he says so I start playing some of my newly ripped CDs as “hold music”. When he got back I asked him what the sound quality was like. “I thought a CD had started playing on my computer” he replied.

Apparently you can have up to a 4-way chat. Though I’ve not tried, if you’re prepared to pay, it allows you to make international, and possibly even local calls. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that has. And even better it has a text based IM client built in so if you like to type instead you can; though why would you bother, Jon? :P

The next bit is to work out how to get VNC working over a VPN across The ‘Net so that James and I can do a bit of remote pair programming…mmmm

Now if only I could find a way to have multiple voice chat conversations going at once without having my brain explode. Oh well I guess it’s a little too early to throw away the IM client after all. DOH!