Thursday 20 January 2011

Round Two ... in which I face Viewer Two for a second time...

....how's that for guts!!!

Ok...so, I am always ready to try new things and admit when I am wrong. So...I thought I would try the new Viewer by Kirsten. Its based on the dreaded viewer 2.... so I wondered how far it had changed under Kirstens careful manipulation and whether it was usable...by me, that is... It is obviously usable by some....

so...



It still looks like you can’t have friends on the left

I can’t make movement arrows and camera arrows stay on screen at the same time...and either of them disappears when I start to IM someone...(bottom right of the screen)




Inventory is in the same place as friends, and LMs....so you can only see either/or at the same time.

If I was gonna IM 2 groups and 4 friends....a situation I often find myself in....my screen would be covered....






soo....I got help... a very kind person called Infinite Mode gave me the following instructions.... under “me” (top lefthand corner... called S21 in Kirstens Viewer)...is Preferences. In preferences....you can choose to have the IMs as Tab rather than stupid boxes... why this is not default is beyond me...

also...best disable "incoming chat pop-ups" unless you want to be driven insane.....

Now....could I combine chat and IMs....??....I went to Help People Island... and a very nice person IMed a group dedicated to helping people with Viewer 2... called... ...and they said No, I cant merge IMs and chat...so thats a pile of crap then.





Now....about these two camera and Movement controls.... if you drag them away from the dock a little downwards pointing arrow appears....this means its now a freestanding item and it doesnt disappear...
So...after an hour and a half I have a viewer that is nearly as good as the old one...except...
I can’t merge my chat and IM boxes.
I can’t view friends, LMs and Inventory at the same time.





...and some stuff has been moved for no apparently good reason...i.e. sound is now top right instead of bottom right.... this last thing..... I could live with..... but why seperate friends and IMs and chat...that makes no sense at all.

so... how many months? is it 10 months since viewer 2 was released? and we have a nearly good enough viewer...

Yes, I could use it, but why on earth would I want to? I know it has been designed partly with touch screen in mind...hence all the 4x4 pixel icons, but this leaves the screen untidy and cluttered.

Not impressed.

:))

7 comments:

  1. OK ..Thank you for experimenting for me, I'll pass on it......... still.
    /me wonders why they cant use the spewer code with the decent UI.

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  2. All reports are that the latest V2 versions are vastly improved over the original. Most importantly it seems much more conducive to customization. But I have yet to learn of a really compelling reason to use it. So why isn't someone building a hybrid viewer? Something that looks like Phoenix or Imprudence, but has the features of V2.x that are actually useful -- shared media, outfit inventory linking, ummm.. anything else? TPVs are already supporting alpha and tattoo layers. There's nothing wrong with the old GUI. It just needs to support the new features so content providers can take advantage without disenfranchising anyone. I don't think UWA has had more than a couple of submissions since the beginning that have used shared media. Artists and builders just don't want to deal with V2, especially when a large portion of the population is not using it, so there's not a lot of motivation to use proprietary features in their builds.

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  3. i heard phoenix was working on a 2.X viewer...

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  4. nicely written exploration of Kirsten's viewer - thanks! =)

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  5. Your screen shots say it all- black, black, black...................
    I too have been revisiting V2. because I found I couldn't wear some things I had bought from Eshi with 1.23 (My guess is there will be more of this sort of incompatablility to come). Also because V2.has caught up with my graphics card (and I guess this will be more prevalent in the future too, as graphics cards change 1.23 and its clones do not recognise the newer versions).
    There's been some minimal improvement but the end result for me is still many more clicks to do things and a lot of the screen covered up by opaque black boxes (I find that BIG side panel so annoying - I want to see the world as well as my inventory or someone's profile - this must be murder for people with smaller screens). The orbit/pan controls still suck.
    But,I persevered .........until I gave up. Did I return to Viewer 1.23? No. The experience of V2 has been so negative I've lost interest in SL for a while.
    Hugs and kisses to all- you may not see me for a while. I hope this aversion is not permanent......and I hope God (or whoever) never decides to put a dirty big black box across a third of my vision of the real world.

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  6. Hurry back, Juanita, we'll miss you.

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