Don’t like the new Skype for Mac design? This should help.

Thousands of Skype users slammed the new 5.0 Beta for Mac release, complaining about its obtrusive UI.

The amount of white space in chat messages raised a considerable amount of complaining, but thanks to an article from DisruptiveTelephony, we now know how to fix it.

How to create a new chat interface

Right-click Skype.app in your Applications folder
Click “Show Package Contents”
Go into Contents > Resources > ChatStyles. There is only one style there, “Panamericana.” You can open it to then restyle chats through the typical combination of CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
Installing: Extract the contents of the chat style from a zip file
Install them into “~/Library/Application Support/Skype/ChatStyles” (create the folder if you need to)
Restart Skype and then choose your chat style from the Preferences:

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Check out PongSocket to download “Panamerica Mini,” a smaller chat style here.

We hope to see a few new Skype chat styles available as this post speeds around the Internet.

N.B. This modification is not available for Skype 5.0 on Windows.

See our complete Skype review here.

Story by Courtney Boyd Myers

Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups gr (show all) Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally. Previously, she was the Features Editor and East Coast Editor of TNW covering New York City startups and digital innovation. She loves magnets + reading on a Kindle. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter @CBM and Google +.