Viewers – Page 133 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Viewers Update 2013-10

2013/03/08 by Nalates Urriah

It has been a while since I took a look at a number of viewers. Rather than post them separately, I’ve lumped them together, except for Nirans. I had not used it for months, so I expected lots of changes.

SL Viewers

The main Linden Viewer is still at version 3.4.5 (270263), pre CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface). I seldom use the Beta Viewer now. It is more of a fall back viewer for when a Development Viewer version has problems. This morning the Beta is at version 3.5.0 (271345). The Development Viewer had been at version 3.5.1 (270826) for about 10 days. Today it updated to 3.5.1 (271386).

I am still fighting with the CHUI update to keep it the size I WANT IT. Other than sizing problems I like the new CHUI. The new build 271386 seems to have some of the sizing problems fixed.

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Nirans Viewer Review 2013-10

2013/03/08 by Nalates Urriah

Niran has said he would stop building Nirans Viewer… So, there is a new release out as of March 7, version 2.1.2 Beta (3.4.6-2512). If you don’t know, Nirans Viewer is an ongoing experiment in user interface design. Niran has a talent for figuring out new ways to do things. Sometimes the ideas are better sometimes worse, but that is how people find the good stuff. I have a challenge finding things after the menus get changed, which is why I am not a frequent user.

Nirans Viewer Preferences - Presets at Top — Nirans Viewer Preferences – Presets at Top

This version of the viewer was much easier for me to use. The defaults are more like the SL Viewer, so I am good until I need to dig into the Preferences.

One of the interesting things in this version (new to me) is the ability to save Preferences settings as different sets of presets. I think this is a great idea. Those of us that move from shopping to exploring to photography to role play… can definitely make use of this feature.

CHUI Moved to Beta

2013/02/28 by Nalates Urriah

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:

[youtube t8IUxCMyElU]

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.

Kokua Viewer Gets CHUI

2013/02/28 by Nalates Urriah

Development on the Kokua Viewer, Imprudence’s replacement, doesn’t get much coverage from me. I do have hopes for great things from it. But, Aurora Sim and Kokua seem to have fallen out of favor.

However, they are still making news. Timothy Rogers has a good article on Hypergrid Business about 10 Reasons to NOT Give Up on Aurora-Sim. And Kokua Viewer has added in code for the new CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface).

Today the Kokua Team announced:

Merge of Communications Hub User Interface (CHUI) is complete and made available for testing. This is an experimental viewer so, please review our testing best practices here. Please give this viewer as much use as possible with attention to recently added client AO and windlight capabilities. Also, regression testing of media and sound streaming is needed. Likes and dislikes can be reported in the comments to this post. Bugs need to be reported in our redmine bug tracker. Downloads are on bitbucket.

New Second Life Dev Viewer

2013/02/27 by Nalates Urriah

I see that yesterday a new version of the Lab’s Development Viewer was released: Second Life 3.5.1 (270826) Feb 26 2013 07:22:18 (Second Life Development). There are no release notes yet, but that is normal. So, we can’t easily know what is different in this viewer.

I’ll remind you this is not a viewer the Lab recommends for everyday use. It is pre-Beta and likely buggy. So, use it at your own risk. So, far it has been working for me.

The obvious change is the Chat Hud User Interface (CHUI).

This change has been in development for weeks. We have had a CHUI Project Viewer for some time. So, we have gotten to see the new CHUI. Some people like it so well they have been using that project viewer as their primary viewer.

Second Life RAM Disk

2013/02/27 by Nalates Urriah

You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.

Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.

While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.