Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah Today I made it to the Open Source meeting, something I seldom do as it is too early for me, 7:00 AM. A few interesting things came up.
[youtube HueOLnF7sW8]
Oz was asking how the community was talking the ending of Phoenix support and the end of the Phoenix Viewer’s useful life. From my perspective, it has been surprisingly quite.
Saturday Jessica Lyon, representing the Firestorm development team and support groups, spoke at the first Phoenix Hour since March 2012. This meeting was to announce the coming end of support for the Phoenix Viewer. That announcement could have been a sentence on the blog. So, why have a Phoenix Hour meeting to make the announcement?
Part of human nature is people having personality and beliefs. The nature of Jessica, the leader of the development team, is such that she is a volunteer. That says something, good I think, about Jessica. So, Jessica was doing her best to explain why they have chosen to end support for the Phoenix Viewer.
Today the Firestorm-Phoenix team held and office hour meeting. The primary announcement was that the team will stop providing support for the Phoenix Viewer on December 31, 2012. I suppose about midnight.
Most of the rest of the meeting was about explaining why. I’ll get to the reasons why in another post. I’ll stick to what is going to be happening here.
The Phoenix Viewer will be available for down for some time. In 2013 the download links for Phoenix will be removed from the main site. One can still find them in the PhoenixWiki. The actual date has not been decided.
The Phoenix Team is going to hold an Office Hour… an open meeting in-world and streamed to the web. The meeting in-world will be at the team’s region: Phoenix Firestorm Support. This link lands you at the door to the meeting hall. You can probably figure out that single landing point is going to be stacking avatars like pancakes the day of the meeting. So, here is an alternate: PhFsSupport. It is about 20m east of the official landing point. Turn 180 and you’ll see the building.
The meeting will be Saturday at 1:30 PM SLT or PST… US West Coast time. The team is advising you get there 30 minutes early… Think about this. One region, one landing point, one entrance to the building… attending is going to be a problem.
The meeting will be streamed to the web: Phoenix Stream.
Yesterday I was helping a friend with a new Windows 8 Laptop. Best Buy had an awesome deal for two days, about 70% off. Yay!
The previous laptop died and we recovered the hard disk and put it into an external drive case. All I needed to do was move the files over and get MS Office installed.
Since I had heard the Metro interface could be turned off, I started looking for how to turn it off. Plus there are a number of programs that purport to do it for you. One is supposed to let you switch back and forth. Well… they don’t work and Microsoft has removed the ability to turn off Metro.
Penny Patton writes thoughtful articles on various aspects of Second Life™. Penny is the one that got me motivated to make a better and more proportional and to scale avatar and she has inspired me to write a few articles. She is currently writing about some of the challenges in Second Life retaining users.
The first article is: A Critical Look at Second Life – Part 1 “Presentation”, which I’ll summarize. Read her article to get the full sense of her thoughts.
Penny questions something I seldom think about, why do people leave Second Life? I tend to look for what keeps people in SL. The difference is in whether one looks for things to do more of or things to do less of to keep people interested. Looking at both is a good thing. Whatever, Penny decided to take a ‘comprehensive’ look at the reasons people leave.