Tateru Nino over at Massively got a sneak peek at the new SL Viewer that is due to be heading our way later this year. This Viewer is apparently the baby of 80/20 Studio (a company that has a depressingly bland and uninformative website considering their goal is to “conceptualise, research, design, develop and deploy solutions that set new standards in user experience”) based on initial work apparently undertaken by Big Spaceship (hired amongst much ballyhoo last November).
Designing a new Viewer cannot be easy. One of the appeals of SL is that it is used by many people in many different ways, and the Viewer needs to accommodate all of them – casual users, gamers, builders, educators, etc., etc. So trying to develop something that is going to please everyone is clearly going to cause upset somewhere.
Then there is the fact that the Viewer as it stands, with one or two tweaks, is remarkable similar to the Viewer that was around 5 years ago. Oh sure, some menu options have moved; the rendering is better, it is less prone to crash on you as soon as you look at it, and so on; but none of these changes (well, apart from the arrival of the God-awful Communicate catch-up pop-up) have fundamentally altered the way we use the Viewer.
And let’s face it, it is and old and trusted friend; we know where everything is, we know what menu is going to pop up when we right-click something; we like our pie menus…
So again, it’s going to be hard for anyone to make substantial changes to the Viewer without causing mass upset and confusion among established users. I don’t envy anyone the task: it has got to be akin to dousing yourself in petrol and then juggling with lit matches.
Even so, the response to the new Viewer has been less than stellar – which is probably why Howard Linden stuck his head above the parapet within hours of Tateru’s blog post appearing to utter words of reassurance on the matter – even going so far as to suggest what Tateru reveals is so “early” in the development cycle as to be meaningless (“We’ll share a sneak peek of the “real” Viewer 2009 later in the year”).
Even so, his platitudes have failed to quell the growing concerns of users – again as evidenced by the comments posted alongside his blog. In part, this is unsurprising. Whenever a senior Linden gives assurances that there will be “plenty of time to receive and incorporate feedback” eyes do indeed roll and hackles do rise. Let’s face it, Linden Lab’s track record on listening to user feedback and “incorporating” it is well, abyssmal.
But, even if this sneak peek isn’t anything like the “real” version that will ship later in the year (in which case, why leak it to Tateru?) – one has to question some of the changes evidenced in the build as seen. In fact more than one has questioned the changes, particularly like the loss of the pie menus.
Others are also asking why the Viewer, some 8 months down the development road, is still lacking features that are now available in other grids, such as an in-built AO (ironically, OpenLifeGrid introduced a built-in walk animation that does away with the Linden Waddle around the time this project started) – and why these features don’t appear to be anywhere on the roadmap.
To be sure, there are some apparently nice features: the new nested Friends option looks particularly useful. The question at the moment is, just how much of user feedback will Linden Lab actually address?
An outsourced Viewer development is obviously not going to be cheap. Despite Howard’s assurances, by the time it gets to RC status and is available as a First Look, one does rather suspect that the only user issues that will be considered and altered will be those of a cosmetic, rather than functional, concern.
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