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:

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.