May 2009

I'm happy to announce to you that today we are delivering to you a second flavor of Skype 4.x series - Skype 4.1 for Windows.

This is currently a beta release which means that it might sometimes not follow your orders, but instead act on it's own. In case this happens, please let us know by commenting on this blog, posting on the forum or reporting issues on our public issue tracker.

If you were not scared by the warning then start the download and continue reading about what you will find in this release. Read also our main blog post.

Skype 4.1 Beta for Windows brings to you long hours of work from our audio and video team. They have introduced screen sharing functionality into Skype for Windows and in addition to that they have also worked hard on audio and video quality and reliability.

When coming back from the audio and video world to other areas then we have brought back some features which did not make it into Skype 4.0. People who use screen readers will notice that we support accessibility correctly in this version. In case you are using JAWS screen reader then you might want to take a look on our accessibility consultants JAWS scripts page for Skype.

As a small extra you will also notice that you can now send contacts and receive birthday reminders for your contacts again.

We have also updated our Internet Explorer and Firefox plugins which now recognize your Skype contacts mentioned on web pages and highlight phone numbers which you can call for free.

In case you are new to Skype or would like to import contacts from different services you will find an improved contacts importing engine, which helps you to import contacts from wide variety of web services, including Gmail, Windows Live hotmail, Yahoo and many local services.

Before ending my post I'd like to give a very big to our volunteer translators and closed beta testers group who have helped us considerably in making this release come true.

As usual in addition to the hard work on implementing new features we have taken time to solve some of the previously found issues. Here you have the full release notes for the 4.1.0.130:

* feature: Screen sharing
* feature: Accessibility
* feature: Skype name highlighting on webpages
* feature: Free call phone number highlighting on webpages
* feature: Contacts sending
* feature: Birthday reminders
* improvement: Audio and Video engine updated
* improvement: Ability to import more contacts from more source
* improvement: Updated Skype for Internet Explorer plugin
* improvement: Updated Skype for Firefox plugin
* bugfix: Skype Internet Explorer plugin did not work with Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7
* bugfix: New Audio device communicator message appeared on every start-up
* bugfix: Dialpad did not open when starting a call, but opened when call was connected
* bugfix: Some menu items in Hebrew and Arabic language showed out as ????
* bugfix: Skype crashed on shutdown sometimes
* bugfix: GDI+ error was displayed when running Skype on Windows 7
* bugfix: Not all audio devices were shown out under audio options
* bugfix: When copying longer text message from one Instant Message to another then you did not have possibility to edit it's controls
* bugfix: Skype crashed when dragging and dropping quoted chat messages
* bugfix: Quick-filtering sometimes highlighted contacts incorrectly
* bugfix: Profile text was cut off when person has emoticon on their 'about me' text
* bugfix: A user was unable to edit contacts phone number more than once
* bugfix: Skype showed that webcam is present, but busy when it was disconnected for some Creative webcams
* bugfix: It was not possible to remove duplicate entries from audio devices list
* bugfix: On client upgrade "View technical release notes for this update" link did not work.
* All language localizations updated: Bulgarian - Nikolina Filipova & Nikolay Filipov, Czech - Petr Silon, Dutch - Kees Koenders, Estonian - Viljar Sepp & Eve Loopere, Greek - Panagiotis Sidiropoulos http://www.magenta.gr, French - Fabrice IMPERIAL & Bruno Lépaulard, German - Claudius Henrichs & Dick Schiferli, Hungarian - Mark Bender & Laszlo Koncz & Gabor Stefanik, Italian - Daniele Conte, Latvian - Intars Students, Lithuanian - Viktoras Kriukovas, Norwegian - Stig Auestad, Polish - Karol Szastok, Portuguese-Portugal - Francisco Ferreira, Romanian - Péter Henning and Mónika Iancu, Simplified Chinese - Della Wang (TOM.com), Traditional Chinese - Carlos Lee (PChome), Turkish - Ömer Emin Dede