Tateru Nino carries some news relating to the initial changes to the official Viewer UI, obtained courtesy of Rhett Linden.
Rhett’s revelations, while interesting reading, are not entirely earth-shattering, and don’t actually go that much beyond what Rod Humble himself has already said concerning the Viewer, and what some of us were speculating as a result.
In a nutshell, Rhett has confirmed:
- The Sidebar is to go. This is something that wasn’t hard to guess at, given Rod himself said as much at SLCC 2011
- There is to be a more flexible approach to the UI in general, that will allow users to, “Arrange the UI to fit the way they use Second Life. This is important because it moves us toward a model more like most creative software“
This latter point more than likely refers to things like the “Customise Toolbars” and the “FUI” (which people have taken to mean “Flexible User Interface”), both of which are mentioned in passing / hinted at in the SL Helpfile wiki pages (although no specific information is available on either right now). Certainly, the release notes for the merge (see below) point in this direction as well.
What is worthy of note is that Rhett confirms that the initial code for the UI changes, which should also see the arrival of things like click-to-move and the new camera palette (again as revealed by Rod Humble, this time talking on the SL Universe forum), was merged into the Development Viewer code today – although TPV developers had been expecting as much, going on comments passed elsewhere during the day.
For those planning on trying out the latest development Viewer, be aware that the release notes state:
- The Viewer floater camera views and presets do not work
- The Nearby Voice panel does not update to a new call or from nearby voice info once opened
- Viewer crashes when updating UI size in preferences
- The Speak button is activated when dragging and dropping between toolbars and/or moving back to the toolbox
- Viewer crash when moving the speak button from one toolbar to another when there is an active call request
- Teleport history doesn’t display visited locations
- Viewer crash when double-clicking the mini-map in People > Nearby
- Notification and conversation chiclets overlap
- WASD controls don’t move avatar while move floater is in focus
- Closing voice controls while a group or p2p call also closes the group call / IM window
- Viewer crash after teleport
- Hitting back in the ‘Create Group’ panel or ‘Blocked’ panel requires multiple clicks for action to occur.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 