Thursday 4 March 2010

Viewer 2.0 Beta

So, I was reading a bunch of forum posts about how sucky the new 2.0 viewer is, and I must admit, I agreed with 99% of them. It is clunky and dull and makes my head hurt; it is too dark, the things that matter are too small, such as text and pictures, and bullshit is too big... such as big grey borders and fucking stupid buttons. One forum post was just so perfect, so wonderful, I had to paste it in here to keep it forever and to share with everyone. It was initially a reply to a post about how Picks have been ruined.

Prokofky Neva:

I couldn't agree more.

And when I see how *consciously* the picks have been destroyed, along with search/places, classifieds on the avatar, etc. I have to wonder if the Lindens held a weekend seminar in which they said:

"How can we break inworld business even more than we've already broken it with land glutting, price hikes and dumps, freebies/commissions policies changes on x-street? How can we *really* bring it to its knees?"

So Schumpeter Linden says, "I know, let's destroy the engine of sales, search/places, by making it unusable, let's fill it with junk, no longer sorted by traffic relevance, and returning only 3 items per search -- that will do it."

Then Darwin Linden says "Let's savage Picks. Let's take them out as an automatic until somebody figures out to use EDIT-something to see them. Then let's make them less visible and hide half the text -- Picks only drive inworld commerce to stores inworld away from our Xstreet property where we collect commission, so let's be sure to really mess this one up."

Then Clusterflock Linden says, "The way to make this look like Facebook, but destroy any semblance of usability like Facebook or the old SL, is to put all the messages in a big black box bunch at the bottom right, where people won't find it easy to look for, and keep it flashing and piling up like a deck of cards. That way, we can drive people to socialize on Avatars United, shop on Xstreet, and not burden our servers by actually being in world, except long enough to take pictures of themselves to put on their fashion blogs."

Then Taylorism Linden says, "Wait, I got a way we can shave some minutes off that experience, too. Let's bork the camera controls, ruin the commands for snapshots, and make taking pictures a mess too -- that will put paid to that extra behaviour."

Then M Linden says, "But then why would anybody bother to log on?"

Stallman Linden then replies, "Just long enough to use all the third-party viewers we're going to give a pass to even under our new rules to copy the content and port it over to Opensim."

I hate the new viewer. Emerald for Life.

Esmie xXx

3 comments:

Snippy Yifu said...

I completely disagree.

Here is my opinion :
The changes are overwhelming at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to them, and after a few days, some of them are even starting to make sense.

The chat system :
I agree, by default, it's awful, but if you go in "preferences" and enable two options, you get the chat system pretty much how it used to be in the old viewer.

Picks :
Again, just a matter of getting used to where they are. I never liked picks that used all the space available, and ended up being of f- novel. That's not what they're meant to be.
And anyway, and this is valid for the search engine too, everything in the UI is kinda working like a webpage, it means LL can change the way things appear very easily. Let's not forget this is just a Beta.
Also, what with a merchant considering picks as a serious business tool ?

Notices : I'm not sure yet, I like this system for when I log in in the morning, and find all the notices I received during the night stacked up in one place, I can easily go through them. I do agree it's not very visible when you re actually in-world and receive a notice, or a message.

So yes, there are a few things that might need to be changed but ... what about the good things ? The improvements ?

- Tattoo layers.
-Masks layers, allowing creators to finnally stop using those bad looking "invisaprims" to make body parts disapearing.
- Outfits : you don't have to copy an item in mutliple folders anymore. The outfits system create "links" now, it's a lot easier to use, and a lot more tidy in your inventory.
- SharedMedia : even if I've been disapointed by its limitation business-wise, the possibility to display any kind of media on a prim surface is still a very neat gadget for "private" use.

Chester and I have been using the new viewer since it's out, and we re both generally happy with it.
So I think you should give it an other try Es :)

Chopper said...

I might to get to see it all when i can afford a new Alienware M17x laptop that will run all this shit.

Snippy Yifu said...

This is something I forgot to mention, apparently (though, it hasn't been confirmed) the new client is taking less ressources than the old one. That's what a lot of people have been reporting anyway.