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Phoenix Hour Summary

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Shug Maitland asked me about a subject that came up in the Phoenix Hour. I’ve been busy with RL this week and not keeping up as much as usual. I had no clue what I was being asked about. I took the time to see what the New Web Profiles fuss was that came up. Also see: New Second Life Web Profiles on Demo

 

Video Start

Link to video: July 12 Phoenix Hour

0:00 to 4:36 is about Phaylen’s bake fail.

Horrors of Bake Fail

4:36 – Jessica says Firestorm Beta 2 now has 25,000 users and growing.  Jessica says they see lots of new users that have not used Firestorm before. My immediate question is how they know if you have used Firestorm before or not?

5:43 – Firestorm and Phoenix support confusion, people forget to say which viewer  they are asking questions about in the support group. Remember to give them a hint when asking questions.

6:50 – Phoenix update, no date for the next release. They do plan to support Phoenix until the grid makes it obsolete. Obsolete being when it fails to render the world correctly and the Lab services it needs go off line. While Linden Lab has said they will not block series 1 viewers, they do not plan to provide the support services they need forever.

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New Second Life Web Profiles on Demo

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UPDATE: These profiles have now gone live in Second Life. Just open your profile to see it.

In the Phoenix Hour Jessica provided a link to the new Twitter like web profile. Fredrik Linden is leading the way on this project. Live feed in your profile is an interesting concept. It also reveals the direction the Lab is heading. I think it also gives a keen insight into what much of the BIG announcement at SLCC may be.

Demo Second Life Twitter-like Feed in Profile - Click to Enlarge

Shug Maitland asked about what the impacts of this new move toward Social Networking would mean for SL residents that want to avoid mixing real life and Second Life. At this point I don’t know. This is the first of the new Web Profiles 2 that I’m seeing. So, more coming soon.

The image above is from the Firestorm Beta 2 Viewer. It is NOT part of the current Firestorm Profile panel. The team will add a button to Firestorm to allow one to access the shown profile in the next release.

To see the profile in all its glory open Fredrik’s profile in a web browser. Also, see the image below.

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Firestorm Milestone

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Today on the Firestorm/Phoenix blog Jessica Lyon announced that Firestorm now has more unique users than SLV 1.23. Not only are there more people using the viewer, their total time in world with the viewer is more than the time in world with SLV 1.23.

Firestorm is still in beta. So, this is a big milestone. While this comes as no surprise to me, it deserves congratulations. Congratulations Firestorm Team!

The Sad Side

Of the 54 team members 38 are support personnel. None of these people are paid employees. The team is made up of volunteers. The viewer and support are provided for free.

In spite of the above there is enough abuse directed at the team that Jessica mentioned it in her blog post. While I have been in debates in the Myst-Uru community about online behavior and seen frustration used as a justification for poor behavior, I’ve never accepted frustration as an excuse. I think it shows a level of immaturity and a lack of ability to cope with life. In other words, such people need the help of a professional counselor.

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Kirsten Viewer S21(8) Released Review

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New release, Kirstens S21 2.8.0 (8) Jul 10 2011, with new stuff is out. This viewer is based on Linden Lab’s viewer code 2.8. The Snowstorm Development viewer has just gone 2.8.0 this week. This viewer will give us a glimpse into new features coming to SL.

Oops - Attachments

Download & Install

File download size is about 32 mb. The install is typical Kirsten. The previous RC3 is uninstalled. Settings, logs and other stuff are saved, except for your graphics settings which are changed to the defaults for your graphics card.

There are some reports of problems from the settings file. So, if you run into problems, delete the settings.xml from C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Kirstens S21\user_settings. The viewer will generate a new file on the next startup. See: S20 Cache & Settings Manual Clearing Howto.

Also, there are some inventory features that are a bit laggy as some of the new stuff in inventory is not yet supported by the server side. That should correct as the features get rolled out to the main grid. Part of the problem is your inventory is connecting to the SL Market Place and that can cause an initial delay.

INSTALL UPDATE 7/11: The normal uninstall/install doesn’t work well. It is better to do a clean install of S21 for this version. See the comments for where KirstenLee noticed that my install was not right.

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Second Life Outfit Folders

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I like the way the new SLV2 Outfits work, somewhat. I have several problems with how the sidebar handles them. There is a work around that I came across in the JIRA that handles my problem with organizing outfits.

Outfits Panel

Problem

The Outfits Sidebar provides only a single list of outfits. This mixes together the outfits I make and the default outfits provided by Linden Lab. As I create more outfits this is going to become more of a problem. So, I want to create folders in the Outfit Panel. But, that is not possible.

There are a number of JIRA feature requests and bug reports about the lack of folders in the Outfits Panel. I’ll get to those later.

Work Around

There is a way to get outfits into folders, sort of. First off, know this is for Series 2 viewers. Don’t mess with your Linden Outfits Folder in Series 1 viewers. Doing so is likely to cause you problems. Also, know you will get different results depending on which version of a Series 2 viewer you use. So, you may need to be flexible.

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Firestorm Beta 2.5.2 (16922) Release Review

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A new Firestorm version is out. Apple, Linux, and Windows versions are available. This is the big step up in Third Party Viewers for builders. The development team has added the build tools. I think it was the lack of this feature most holding Firestorm back. Following is my experience with the new Firestorm.

Firestorm Viewer Beta 2

Download

Tuesday and Wednesday the download process was very slow. I am guessing lots of people are finally making the change over to a V2 type viewer. I certainly see patience with anti-V2 people running out in the support groups. Not Firestorm’s support people. They are great. But, the Firestorm users that chime into help other Firestorm users are getting an edge. After they made the change and survived.

May be I’ll make a T-shirt that says I survived the change… ummm… maybe I could word that better.

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