Tateru Nino has and article out on the coming new viewer. See: Say goodbye to the side-bar. Rhett Linden talks Second Life UI redesign goals. I got it and took it for a spin. The image here shows the new user interface.
New Viewer Interface
You can see the new 3.2.1 Viewer interface, if you are using the Development Viewer. It has a few problems:
Known Issues:
o The Viewer floater camera views and presets do not work.
o The Nearby Voice panel does not update to a new call or from
nearby voice info once opened.
o Viewer crashes when updating UI size in preferences.
o The Speak button is activated when dragging and dropping between
toolbars and/or moving back to the Tool Box.
o Viewer crash when moving the speak button from one toolbar to
another when there is an active call request.
o Teleport history doesn't display visited locations.
o Viewer crash when double-clicking the mini-map in People > Nearby.
o Notification and conversation chiclets overlap.
o WASD controls don't move avatar while the Move floater is in focus.
o Closing voice controls while a group or p2p call also closes the
group call/IM window
o Viewer crash after teleport
o Hitting back in the 'Create Group' panel or 'Blocked' panel
requires multiple clicks for action to occur.
The New Interface
New Left Menu - No Sidebar Panels
The interface is nice. The side bar is gone!!! Panels are floaters!!!
I’ve been using the Development viewers quit a bit lately. So, the change over for me is a trivial adaption. The buttons for the panels are at the left side and bottom of the screen. The right to lef change will take a day or two to get used to.
The install was easy. No cache or settings clear and it launched and ran. \o/
It is fast. In my cottage I’m getting 35 to 45 FPS on my 8800 GTS Duel Core2.
HOWEVER, I do crash on teleport. It even stalls my Vista Windows Crash logger… :/ However, if you login to your Last Location you will be in the area you tp’d to. And it doesn’t crash on every TP, just some.
When I did make it to Celtic Myst my FPS was about 25. Oh and this is with AA on 4x.
Jumping home, I did not crash. Next I jumped over to Dance Island and did not crash. While downloading I was getting 10 FPS. The interest list doesn’t seem to work well. I have stuff far and near rezzing. With 26 people and bad Time Dilation and Physics FPS I never got over 15 FPS.
When I tp’d home, I crashed again.
Changes
I guess the big feature change is the prep for Direct Delivery. Which rolled to the main grid Tuesday, I think. In the inventory there is a big new Received Items button and section. This is where items purchased from the market place will arrive. Received won’t be lost in the list of system folders, as I was expecting.
New Receive Section for Direct Delivery
There are more menu items that take one to the SL web sites. A link to your SL Dashboard has been added to the ME menu item. It takes the place of Preferences, which has been moved down the list.
New Me Menu Items
One of the items in the list is: Tool Bars. This opens a panel titled: Customize Toolbars. You can drag buttons from this panel to areas on the screen that highlight. As the button gets close you can see an ‘insert’ indicator showing you where the button will snap to. Let go and pop, this is the button. Drag a button from the menu bars and drop it in the panel to remove it from the menu bars.
Target areas for the buttons are left, bottom, and right. The top is not a candidate…
Buttons can be text, icon, or both. Right click the buttons in the menu to change. And there is a handy restore defaults button.
There are new movement options. They have been in the Development viewers for a time now. But, most have probably not seen them yet. In Preferences -> Move & View there is a Single click on land and Double click on land options; No action, Move to clicked point, and Teleport to clicked point. If you haven;t been using them and mouse steer having Single enabled will toss you a curve.
Help is built in. It has all the basic stuff, how to move, etc.
SL Help Feature
We still have chickettes, the button kind. But they have moved to the upper right. Clicking them opens the IM/Group windows below them. See the images.
Chicklettes Move to Upper Right
There is a button that fooled me on the left menu. I thought it was people or groups. But, it is AVATARS. Click it and select an avatar. This should make it easier for new users.
New Avatars Panel
The landmarks panel still opens with all the folders expanded. For me that is a problem. May be I have too many landmarks.
New Destinations Guide
The Destinations Guide has changed. It is now categorized. I think it is a brainy idea, but not as handy as the bigger Destination Guide. This smaller compact one won’t promote places as well as the larger one did, IMO.
This is a pretty nice viewer. I doubt the V1 users will be impressed. I am impressed. I can stop freaking out as this is not a repeat of the V2 fiasco.
Summing it up
This is a nice viewer. I like it. I’ve only used it a little bit because the crash after TP is so painful.
Check out the rest of the images.
Received Items Section in Inventory
Search - Not Much Change
Basic Chat Bar
Expanded Chat
HTTP Inventory
🙂 The End 🙂
Um, nice – but STABILITY is the key – after ALL these YEARS – having a UI that doesn’t crash – and doesn’t crash windows – would be the best development EVAR! 😉
I agree. To me the Dev Viewer is by definition a test viewer and is expected to be buggy.
The main stable viewer uses some Open Source libraries. As those change and introduce problems and changes that create problems within the SL software we are likely to always see viewer stability come and go. The Lab is working hard to change SL and make it more popular. So, we can expect lots of rapid change. Anything done quickly will have problems.
If the Lab changed over to all proprietary software they would have better control. But, I don’t know it would improve things enough to be worthwhile. Might be. Might not. But, it would be really hard on the TPV Dev’s.
Software development is error prone. A 100,000+ lines of computer code in which everything must be spelled correctly, in perfect order, have every period, comma, semicolon, and parentheses in the right place will have problems. And that doesn’t even start to consider the logic problems. Some of us are surprised anything works.
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Two things concern me about this new UI (well, one is more of a boggle than a concern, really) –
1. What will happen to those still using V1-based viewers (and there will continue to be many, I suspect) once Direct Delivery is rolled out? Will their received items go into the Objects folder, or will a new folder appear for them somewhere in the system folders (much as My Outfits did when that was rolled out, or the addition of the #Phoenix folder for users of that viewer)? There simply *has* to be a way for those not using a viewer with the Received Items area to still obtain items from Marketplace. I know many V1 users are regarded as Luddites, but many are stuck in their ways and many have hardware issues that mean they simply cannot use V2 and V3 viewers as they stand (the dreaded NVIDIA driver crash, or the basic shaders issue that persists for some people). I do hope Linden Lab have considered that some people will not/cannot switch to V2/V3.
2. The boggle thing is… why on earth is ‘top’ not an option for the toolbars?! Seriously, everyone is used to looking at the top of almost every program for menus and other toolbars (with the exception of some games, such as WoW that plaster them all over the screen). If you build, then at least a topside toolbar is out of the way. Everyone likes to have things a certain way (for instance, I like chat on the top-left and inventory on the bottom-right, with mini-map and lag meter on the top-right) and being able to move toolbars *wherever you want them*, not just to a few specified places is something that just about every web app gives you the ability to do these days.
One final gripe (heh) – I wish LL would settle on one viewer! I create tutorials for newbies, among other things: how to do this and that, how to make this, how to change these settings and what they do, etc, and since V2 started changing so much I’ve simply given up. My tutorials have always been heavily-screencapped, but when the UI changes as much as these viewers have of late, the hours that I spend capping and adding text are just wasted because they’re obsolete a couple of months later!
Thanks, by the way, Nalates, for your regular updates on this blog. You’re the one person that I know will always have the latest info on anything new rolled out in Second Life. I really appreciate the time that you take to test things and keep us all updated 🙂
Hi Mariel.
#1 I have seen info from the Lindens saying V1 viewers will handle the new inventory Received Items feature. Seems this is more of a server side thing than a viewer side thing. I would never guess that. I expect we will find out if that is true in the next couple of weeks. Whatever the case, the life of V1 is short.
#2 I agree. It may be a clue that more changes are coming to the top menu. Or they may have run into a layer display problem. In some cases buttons and drop down menus fall behind or on top of each other in ways that make them unusable. If that is the case, we may see a button section at the top some day.
I know the problem with tutorials. It is a pain. I don’t expect that problem to go away anytime soon. We aren’t the only ones that have tutorial update problems. I wade through lots of Blender tutorials looking for the 2.5x version tutorials. I prefer the software update way more than not. I can deal with the annoyance of outdated tutorials.
Thx for the kind words. I’m glad you enjoy the blog. Tell your friends… 🙂
Thanks for all the screen shots and analysis. This is a positive development! One note – the small IM icons are called Chiclets, not Chickettes. Chiclets is a brand name of chewing gum that comes in small colored squares.
Thx 🙂
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Uhmm, so basically it is a replacement of buttons ?
It still looks so bulky and terribly boring grey to look at, not elegant at all.
Chat still looks unusable, still these bulky closing crosses…. eeew.
Unnecessary screen space being used for near blank bars and lines.
Can we please have an elegant UI? Thank you !
For V2-3 it is an improvement… elegant would be nice.