Styling Skype Beta for Mac

A few hours back, a new Beta of Skype for Mac hit the interwebs. The twitter was going all crazy for it. This new Beta of Skype for Mac included some drastic UI changes. (read: 100% of the UI has changed)

One of the most noticeable visual changes was the amount of whitespace. Because the window looked like it was a Web View, and I saw something about Chat Styles in the settings, I decided to dig into the Skype.app package.

If you right-click Skype.app and click Show Package Contents you will be able to find Contents > Resources > ChatStyles. In here, I dug into the Panamericana.SkypeChatStyle, which is a package on itself. These SkypeChatStyles are fully based of web technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript.

I decided to duplicate Panamericana and edit it into an initial version of my own SkypeChatStyle. The sole focus of the initial version is removing a lot of unnecessary white space from the Chat Window, without cramping it too much.

“Panamargincana”

I present to you, Version 0.1 of Panamargincana.

Before:

After:

How to install a custom SkypeChatStyle

Updated! Thanks to Andy!

  1. Download the custom SkypeChatStyle
  2. Go to the Library folder in your Home folder.
  3. Open the Skype folder within the Application Support folder.
  4. Create a ChatStyles folder if it doesn’t exist.
  5. Drag Panamargincana.SkypeChatStyle into this folder
  6. Restart Skype.
  7. Go to Skype Preferences and choose “Panamargincana” in the Style dropdown in the Chat section.

Find something off? Remarks?

Give me a shout on twitter!