Viewer 2 Different .0

I live in Australia and eat Vegemite. Like most Australians I like to put cheese on top. When Kraft announced a vegemite with cheese included I though it was a great idea. Until they tried to be cool and named it iSnack 2.0. Everyone hated the name so much that Kraft withdrew the product from sale in less than a week.

Somtime trying to be cool is the fastest way to alienate your existing customers. 

Linden Labs has just released the public Beta of Viewer 2.0. They have warned us that we might not like it, but think noobies will like it. So what does that mean?

Well, Viewer 2.0 looks fantastic visually. It's got a dark menu frame around it which removes all the eye strain associated with the old silver colour theam they previously had. From then on it becomes a game of hide and seek in the new sidebar to find all the functions which previously existed on the bottom menu bar.

On the plus side there is an icon based indicator for people who IM you that looks a little like the windows quick launch bar. On the down side it becomes messy if you are switching between conversations quickly. Each conversation gets its own seperate chat window. I think creators will have the most trouble with this when trying to give customer support to multipal people.

The IM windows themselves now have a fully blank line that is black with the avatars name, followed by what they said, so that every line of chat is now a minimum for 2 lines. This works ok until you get into a fast group chat where half of your screen space is waisted by black lines with nothing but the avatar's name on it. I hope the chat format becomes a configuable option, or else this is going to be very frustrating as people have to make the chat window bigger just to follow a converstation.

Most windows now have a minimize button. So if your like me and used to pressing the x, your going to find yourself totaly closing conversations that you only wanted to minimize. It might help if these little minimise/close icons were a bit further appart too.

One of the things I immediatly missed was the way the mouse changes to indicate Sit/Touch/Pay/Open/etc as the default action for a prim. The mouse shows only a Hand when the prim has a scripted action associated with it, but no indication as to what this action is. I'm sure those people who like Passive Sit-Based Orbitors are going to love this.

I was insulted by how this viewer treated my carefully thought out profile. The profile is an important expression of who you are in SL, and it has been shoved into the sidebar like it was an afterthought. People have to click on links just to see the full text in your profile. You could be forgiven for thinking it was the first step in removing avatar profiles totaly.

There are some strange things in the viewer behaviour which will make building frustrating. When you open the sizebar the whole world shifts to the left. The bar dosnt just overlay the inworld view like the current viewer, it pushes the world out of the way. This is going to become frustrating when you open the bar to load inventory into an object which is then shifted off the edge of your screen! Opening menus should not effect your camera position inworld. Lets hope they go back to the overlying of the menus and sidebars.

Builders will be thankfull that LL didnt mess with the building menu. It is still very familar so we should be able to instinctivly click on the right spots. I was impressed with how fast the invetnory in the contents tab loaded. I'm used to opening the QHUD and waiting 2 minutes for the contents to load, but it loaded instantly in the new viewer and appeared to be editable right away.

Being a Beta there are a bunch of strange graphics gliteches, especialy for HUDS, but it was the vanishing objects in-world that amused me. I touched on my multi product vending machine and the prim vanished while the texture was changing! It didnt just turn invisible as beacons could not see it either. It just vanished totaly! After a few minutes it reappeared for no apparent reason.

The script and notecard windows have been given a new font which is far to thin aginst the bright white background of the windows! Floating text is also suffering from the same thin font issue. They need to revert to the old font which was easy to read.

I'm sure this will all be sorted out by the time Viewer 2.0 comes out of Beta. In the meantime I can see I will be spending a lot of time in the JIRA to make sure in-world content looks the same in viewer 2.0.

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Overall LL have done a good job making this viewer pretty for the Dot.Com generation, but I dont think they paid enough attention to the needs of creators, as the interface makes customer support harder.

There is clearly a long way to go in getting the in-world content looking the same on the new viewer. We dont want to go the way of web browsers where one page can look good in IE and bad in firefox.

The viewer programming team can take a cookie from the reward jar, but they have to eat it at their desk because they are not finished work yet!