September 2006

Today we released another Beta update approaching our final 1.3 release - now it’s a 1.3.0.50 with a huuge change log and a lot of improvements.

[Go check it out](http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/13beta.html)

I haven’t updated the blog for a while. Autumn started here a bit ahead of time. I was helping our new developer to feel at home. And Skype development is going so fast now I don’t know where to start.

We’re heading to gold release. There are several essential problems that are holding us back. There are less than 5 of them tho, so we’re in rather good shape. Andy started his acquaintance with the code by fixing some minor nuisances, that make UI feel broken here and there, and overall disrupt comfortable work with Skype.

The non-UI side has experienced some improvement, too. We now have a better-faster buildbox and our closed beta testers receive builds for full range of supported distros at once. I plan to set up a nightly build script so that we can benefit from some more automation out there.

The global news are that we have hit 7 million users online simultaneously. And many more of them are now Linux Skype users

Oh, and a recent poll of Linux users have shown us three most often requested features, they are:

1. Video
1. Video
1. Video

We’re doing our best to implement it, but I think it is not going to be included in 1.3 series, so stop asking, cross fingers, and wait for 1.4 release