Second Penguins

The beta release of the Second Life Viewer has been opened to the public, and I encourage you to do three things.

First, pull the latest stable browser and upgrade to that first. You'll thank me for that later.

Second, pull the beta browser. They say Viewer 2.0. I'll call it v2.0b3 for right now. Use it for a while.

Third, bitch and moan about it to Linden Labs, because there are many problems that are wrong with it, and a lot of them deal with the User Interface (or UI). My first impressions leave me to make a list:

Where is everything?!? Everything has shifted around. Inventory and other popups are now sidebars. Navigation and camera work is on the bottom as attached popups, which you can rip away. Options in the preference pane have moved around or have been removed and hidden in debug settings that don't work. It's got a case of GNOME Option Removal Syndrome.

What did you do to my camera?!? While they added different views for avatars, they also split up the controls so you can't easily move it around without clicking much more to switch controls. Adding more complexity is a bad UI design move.

What did you do to the CHAT?!? The default is now this IM/LiveJournal/Twitter style that devotes a full row to the person's profile picture and the person's name. You can switch it off in Preferences after you log in (and not before like v1.23).

Unfortunately, if you like the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) style without a time stamp on each and every message, there's a debug option you can toggle but it doesn't work in this beta.

WHERE AM I?!? Yes, Virginia, there's a navigation bar like in a browser. It takes up a ton of space. I usually remove it as well as that “Favorites” bar, but now there's no indication of where you are in a particular sim; it's completely blank up there.

The penguin gets shafted again. A new feature is that each face of a prim can now be a full web browser, with plugins and more. Point it at a page and it works nicely... except in Linux. I get a completely blank prim.

However, if you're on Windows (I haven't checked the Mac yet), you can get a nice browser and the ability to play Flash games that don't require a keyboard. I was able to get a demo of the features on the day of the release.

VWR-812 is in, or is it? Avatar Masking finally appears with an extra tattoo layer to boot, but the UI inconsistencies makes using the feature non-intuitive. It's not in a “skin,” that's just a full-body tattoo like in V1.x. It's also in a separate section of the appearance menu.

That said, if you have alpha on the skin layer, just select the same texture. Be mindful that this is not a full alpha blend, but a 1-bit masking: it's ether on or off. You can also toggle full-masking of various areas, saving texture space.

I was really hoping we'd get a 1.24 or 1.25, and there was a lot of hype with the 2.0 viewer on Twitter from Fred and Torley Linden – dropping small hints here and there that caused an Apple iPad like frenzy. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

To fix this mess, I would definitely drop back to the 1.x UI. Let the navigation bar be auto-hidden, accessible by clicking the location status on the top of the screen. Don't let the UI go space-hoggy and be in the need of a face lift like some websites (*cough*Slashdot*cough*). I do like it that various items are sidebars and now links to clothing and worn attachments are made.

But this is a free beta. Nobody paid into it, which is a good idea.

There's promise, but it needs a lot of tweaking... and a lot of input. Definitely pull the beta, try it out, and give Linden Labs your feedback, even if it is negative. Without it, it'll get worse.