Information Research Weblog

I've just downloaded the new version of Skype - the one that allows video calls - and I find that it suffers from a frequently occurring problem, which I might call, "messing with features for no good reason". In this case, Skype has abandoned its perfectly sensible procedure of listing at the top of the Contacts window all of those contacts who are online, so that one can see at a glance who is there. The new default is to list ALL contacts by name, whether they are online or not - total idiocy. I assume that I may be able to produce something akin to what existed before by defining a 'group' - but what on earth is the point of requiring me to do that when the earlier method was ideal? I sometimes think that software and interface designers never get anywhere near the real world!