A short bullet-pointed rant about both Spotify and Skype on the Mac
I use both Spotify and Skype on the Mac. In fact, I pay for both. Here is a short list of the things which irritate me today about both, in no particular order. Given the age of both, I don’t expect either to be occurring by now.
- Both: either use Sparkle or get distributed through the Mac App Store. Your own updaters are pitiful. I run as a non-admin user, but have admin credentials which I can provide when needed. In the case of Skype this means I can only ever update manually (it actually goes to the trouble of downloading the update, then fails with a cryptic error when it can’t overwrite Skype.app). With Spotify, it’s almost worse: it updates entirely automatically, but when it discovers the install location isn’t writeable, it dumps the updated copy in
~/Applications, cheerfully creating it if it doesn’t exist. Great. Now I have two different copies of Spotify. Both Sparkle and the Mac App Store handle this completely gracefully (i.e., they prompt for elevated credentials when needed). Update: Skype fixes this as of version 6.6. - Spotify: Don’t breathlessly tell me a new album is available, and then tell me it’s not available when I hit the “Play” button. Good grief.
- Spotify: What on earth is with the randomly de-authorising machines for offline use? Urgh. Don’t try to make it automatic and byzantine; either give me a list of devices, or make it work properly.
- Spotify: Stop spamming syslog with
Spotify[21722]: setShowsApplicationBadge: is not yet implemented for the NSApp dockTile. - Skype: I don’t know why you think
Skype[21446]: WebFlashData cannot find Macrodmedia flash player SharedObjects directory, error Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=260 "The folder “#SharedObjects” doesn’t exist." UserInfo=0x1a2a2c0 {NSUserStringVariant=( Folder ), NSUnderlyingError=0x1a111a0 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -43.)", NSFilePath=/Users/mo/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects}appearing in my logs is fine: whether it’s the misspelling of “Macromedia”, the miscapitalisation of “Flash”, or the fact that you’re dicking around in there in the first place. Stop it. - Skype: Turning off emoticons (particularly animated emoticons) should not have a measurable effect upon CPU usage in this day and age.
- Skype: To load more than the last few lines of conversation history should not take multiple seconds. Update: Skype fixes this as of version 6.4.
- Skype: Sync read status between devices, or don’t let me log into multiple devices simultaneously, for goodness’ sake. I’m bored of missing messages because I forgot to quit Skype at home before heading to work.
- Skype: Given that Lync for Mac is utterly horrible, when will I be able to log into my corporate Lync server at the same time as logging into my external account? I suppose group conversations or group video/voice calls between corporate Lync and public Skype participants will be out of the question?
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
In the interests of fairness I should note that Microsoft may have fixed some of the Skype issues since I last updated. That was a while ago, because updating it is a ball-ache and it doesn’t even tell me that there’s a new version available to manually download and install.