The consensus at this point is that Skype 5 on Mac OSX is ugly and wastes a ton of screen space for no good reason (all of this is true, btw.) But, you don’t have to live with the ugliness. It’s not widely known, but Skype 5 supports skins or “chatstyles”, which are constructed entirely in HTML/CSS/Javascript, so they’re easy to write and hack.
Skype’s official page for information on ChatStyles: http://macthemes.skype.com/start
Here are a few of the alternate ChatStyles available on github:
- PanamericanaMini - this is probably the first alternate ChatStyle. It’s very similar to the default Panamericana theme, but with some whitespace removed.
- Brief - nice theme. Check out the screenshots.
- My fork of Brief on github - I like the Brief chatstyle, but I made some small modifications to further reduce extra whitespace and I modified colors slightly.
- Simples - heavily influenced by the Renkoo style for Adium. Screenshot.
- StyleShift - reduced whitespace, every image URL is expanded in a linked thumbnail, custom emoticons.
More ChatStyles are available in Skype’s ChatStyle Gallery. They’re also running a competition, so you can go vote for your favorite.