It is all over the place now. The new Chat Hub User Interface (CHUI) is now part of Linden Lab’s® Beta Viewer. That happen more quickly than I expected. Just the other day it hit the Development Viewer. So, if there are not a lot of JIRA’s filed I expect it to arrive in the main viewer quickly too.
Torley has a video out, without the friendly greetings, and the Lindens have made a blog post.
The video:
Torley does nice videos. Thanks Torley. This one is very handy. But, check out the Linden post for more details and to discuss the changes.
Ciaran Laval has an article up that explains a bit about the CHUI. See: Chui Hits Beta, LL Equip Their Flak Jackets. He is expecting them to get some blow back on the new user interface. That is a pretty safe bet that has nothing to do with the CHUI. It is a change and that draw flak.
Some people in the SL Forum think this User Interface (UI) is more like the old V1 user interface. Some reflexively hate it… expected. Others like it, me for instance. But, most are complaining about the space it takes up.
Using it I tried different ways to shrink it down. It is possible but in the Development Viewer it was buggy. Sometimes I could shrink the size and other times I could not. I did find that when I could not drag the lower right corner to make it smaller, I could click and drag the divide pane and then dragging the right side or lower right corner would work. Play with it.
In general I could get the new CHUI to a size that worked for me. It was not as easy as I would like and it seemed to have some problems remembering the sizes. Also, tearing off chat windows seems a bit buggy.
There is a CHUI Project in the JIRA. You can file and find items using CHUIBUG. If you have not filed a JIRA report before read the instructions before trying to file one. Do it right and you’ll likely see it fixed… don’t expect a notification when it is fixed or for it to happen quickly.
There is: BUG-1820 – Focusing undocked window switches to “dead space” in CHUI dock. To see the problem: Undock “Nearby chat” from CHUI dock, IM other avatar or group to have an active IM window in the CHUI dock. Click in the “Nearby chat” window to type there.
I’ve been playing around with it since the project viewer came out and it has some very positive features which I hope won’t be overlooked due to one or two issues that people will undoubtedly highlight, the screen space being the big one but as you point out, you can get around that, it just takes some patience and focussing on the positives it brings.
People will like the new chat history and conversation logs if they give it a chance.
I agree. The history access is nice. I have a Notepad++ that opens my chat logs when it opens. I’ll be able to do this much more easily now.
In my opinion, this CHUI stuff is right out a monstrosity: it takes a HUGE amount of place on the screen, it makes things confusing by not separating IM/groups conversations from local chat (RPers will hate it !), the posts formatting with all the icons and bold names is distracting (where’s the “plain text chat” features ?), the one window for everything makes it impossible to follow several different conversations at once, the chat input line is ridiculously small (RPer will hate it more for it), etc, etc, etc.
I’m glad I can still use the clean, lean, fast, clear, efficient v1 UI with my own viewer…
I’ve been using it with multiple conversations. I hate that it blanks the the hub’s chat section when one is using a detached chat window. That makes it more awkward than necessary. But, I can use multiple windows and get by.
BUT… my way of using it is consuming huge amounts of screen space. I can size the chat windows down. Sizing is not as easy as I think it could be and I think it is buggy when sizing. I think I will eventually settle into a style of use that works for me. I think it will be better than chiclet style. I am figuring it out.
I am not yet sure and need to use it some more. But, it seems to be working better… or may be fewer people are chatting because the Hub has them confused, so chat just seems to work better… in a few days I can decide.