A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft brought its new Skype icon to Android and iOS. Today, the tech giant has introduced a bunch of new enhancements for the communications service. In concise form, these include message drafts, bookmarks for messages, the ability to preview files before they are sent to others, a new way to display multiple photos and videos, and a split window feature.
Essentially, all the changes are brought with the aim of increasing productivity for users and hence, provide a more enriching chat experience. To expand a bit further on each of these, starting off with message drafts, any message that has been typed out but not sent will now be saved in the form of draft. This basically means that it won"t disappear if you back out of the chat or the app, and instead be marked with a "[draft]" tag. Upon reentering the relevant chat, the message will appear in its original form in the text box.
As far as bookmarking is concerned, any message can now be bookmarked by right-clicking upon it or long pressing it, and then selecting the "Add bookmark" option. It will then be saved in the Bookmarks tab from where it can be accessed quickly any time. Moving on, media and files can now be previewed before they are sent. As is the case with other popular messaging applications, this means that the uploaded videos, photos, or files will be displayed in the messaging panel, with the additional options of inserting more media files and writing a relevant message to be sent along with the selected files.
Furthermore, multiple photos and videos shared at around the same time will now be bunched together in the form of an album. This makes them appear in a more presentable way in the chat window. Lastly, the split window feature introduced earlier this year for Skype on Windows 10 is now available for all versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux running the latest Skype release. For those who haven"t got a chance to test it out yet, it enables the placement of your contact list in one window, with the added ability of opening conversations in separate windows.
Notably, with the exception of split window which is only usable on desktop for now, all other features are now available on the latest version of Skype across all platforms. You can download Skype for Desktop here, or alternatively, get the Windows 10 version from the Store here.