Skype Chat Typo Editor

Anyone who uses Skype chat knows about typos:

I lvoe you
lvoe -> love

To solve this, the newest Skype lets you edit the typo even after you’ve sent it. Cool! Just right-click the history.

Colour

But the changes badly need to be coloured. It’s really hard to tell what bits someone changed - and hard to even notice that they have corrected it. Colour will help.

Obvious

The feature needs to be a bit more obvious. Hardly anyone tries to right-clicking the message. A single-click would be better - or possibly even an [edit] link or pencil icon behind each message.

Getting it done

Once pledges reach target on this project I’ll let Skype know and try to interest them in developing it. The cash will be a carrot for them, and they can ask for more pledges if they need them. Note that you don’t have to pay a cent until development happens. It may also be possible for a 3rd party developer to do it as a Skype add-on using their API. But it would obviously be better as a built-in.

Backward compatibility

Unfortunately, it only works in the latest Skype, and if your friend isn’t using the latest, or is using the latest Linux Skype, they won’t see a thing … and you won’t know that they aren’t seeing it.

To solve this I propose that when you edit a message, Skype sends a simple text message to older clients that says something like:

__edit 8 chars back: change 'lvoe' to 'love'__

This project was inspired by IMWiki.