Image shared by Benjamin Linden under a Creative Commons License 2.5
Today I was exploring the blogosphere about Second Life and found some interesting information about projects for the new User Interface (UI) of the Second Life Viewer. Specially good this post from Vint Falken.
The image above is from the Second Life Wiki page about the User Interface Improvements project, is a good way to start exploring the next future if the SL UI, the mainlines of the project.
Linden Lab is not only working in changes in the UI, also in “Second Life Viewer skins“!!!!
I think is a good moment for the improvement, personally i don’t like too much this UI right now, specially the “Communicate” window were you have all IM, Chat History, Friends and Groups in the same space with tabs, difficult to use, ugly to see. And will be good if the new UI is more friendly and clear.
But not only Linden Lab is working on a new UI for the SL Viewer, The Electric Sheep Company launch a new and more user-friendly Second Life Viewer! The Electric Sheep Company is one of the most important Metaverse developers, owners of OnRez. The name of the viewer will be OnRez Viewer and will have more integration with WWW and their OnRez On-line Store. They are still working on it, but have an “info page”.
If you prefer to use a “Open Source” option, please check the blog by Nicholaz Beresford. He and some other people developed a patch over the “main” viewer with a lot of bugs fixed.
I, for one, would be very happy to see some improvements to the current UI. Like you, Raul, I really don’t like the ‘communicate’ window – far too messy and it doesn’t shrink as small as the old IM window used to. It will be interesting to see what they come up with to improve things.
I’d like to try the “open source” viewer by Nicholaz, some people says is great and works better than the LL one. I’ll tell you my experience.
About the “Communicate” window, well, i think that the old “multiwindow” system was not exactly the best, but at least was better and easier to use than the actual one. Now, when you have more than three IM going at the same time, all is a madness of flushing tabs, lol
Diversity is almost always a good thing. This is where I think open source has its greatest part to play. With many independent developers working on alternate solutions, a selective parallel evolution can occur with each developer being able to adopt the very best strategies proven by others, and ultimately the users will be able to choose from a field of options each greater than the original. Even Microsoft finally realised this, so I am very excited by what people are doing with the SL interface. I may well install different interfaces according to what I am logging on to do, in the same way I switch between browsers according to my needs. The communicate interface is certain to be a hot topic as this is where other developers can easily experiment with innovative ideas, but the Linden browser may still prove better for other tasks. Exciting times indeed!
Some more info about all this:
The “OnRez Viewer” by The Electric Sheep Company will be released on Oct 24th.
Yesterday i installed the “open source patch” (MAC version) by Nicholaz Beresford, and is really good! Viewer works better, i had no crashes and friends, groups and IMs are in different windows
(Yay!)
Raul, just as you and Phoenix, i don’t like the current history window. it covers half of your screen, if you have lots of IM’s, you won’t be able to see the last ones, if you are not paying good attention, you have to scroll from right to left, and back again…. I will pay someone to make that disappear.
Well, Looker, i recommend you the Nicholaz’s patch, IM have their own window with tabs, friends and groups have their own window each, so is quite similar to the old window system style. Moreover, with this patch, the client is a bit more stable and doesn’t crash so often as the “official” viewer.
You don’t need to pay to make that disappear, lol, the patch is free, take a look at the blog by Nicholaz Beresford.