In response to requests from developers and its business partners, Sykpe has decided to continue support for call recording and hardware devices in its Desktop API.

When we posted Skype Terminating Desktop API less than a fortnight ago we hoped that Skype would take some notice. Now, I Programmer has received an email that confirms that Sykpe was listening and that it has responded in a positive manner.

Skype announced that it will extend support for two of the most widely used features – call recording and compatibility with hardware devices – until they determine alternative options or retire the current solution.

Although the official blog post of the news does continue:

 chat via third party applications, will cease to work as previously communicated

It seems that the developer site hasn't been fully restored to support the old API. The only documentation presented is still just for the new URI based API. 

The loss of the ability to work with chats from the old desktop API is a problem for any programmer with an app that makes use of it, but the new URI-based API does have very similar features. This means that it should be possible to modify the app to use the new API.  This isn't the case for the audio recording and hardware aspects of the old API, so the fact that will continue into the future is an improvement. 

Skype/Microsoft's change of heart satisfies the major concerns of those who would otherwise have been severely impacted by dropping the Skype desktop APIs.