Day: February 28, 2012

Catznip R6: purring along

Posted on by Inara Pey

catznip logoJust as I pushed out the weekly Viewer round-up, Kitty and the gang slipped out Catznip R6, which nicely compliments (and perhaps complements!) R5. My timing sucketh.

R6, based on LL 3.2.7 code, is a maintenance release that fixes a range of bugs and gives Group management some love and attention and well as adding other nibbles to enjoy.

Changes to Group Notices

If you’re constantly pushing out Group Notices, you’re liable to like this. You can now create a Group Notice without having to open Group information first. Simply display your Group list (COMMUNICATE->GROUPS or CTRL-SHIFT-G), right-click on the name of the Group for which you wish to create a notice and select CREATE NOTICE. You can still create Notices in the usual way as well – via the Group information floater itself, but the menu option is liable to be a timesaver.

Nor does it end there. Rather than being confined to the Group floater, the Create Notice option now gets a floater of its own, meaning that when used with the new menu short cut, less screen real estate is used-up. All the functionality associated with raising a Group Notice is retained, and the floater can be resized to suit your needs while writing.

New Group Notice floater (shown here being opened the “conventional” way)

Viewing a Group’s archive of Notices is now also easier, thanks to another addition to the contact menu: simply right-click on a Group in your list and select VIEW NOTICES to immediately display the history of recent Notices for the Group in the Group floater.

Staying the Groups, the Group toast has been reworked for greater clarity with:

  • The details of the notice sender and Group are now displayed on separate lines and are clickable – clicking the Group name will open the Group’s profile; clicking the sender’s name will open their personal profile
  • The number of visible lines in the Notice has been increased from 7 to 10 for better readability
  • The date is displayed in a smaller font to provide better separation between it and the notice title and the main body of text.

Finally, Groups get a handful of bug fixes, as detailed in the release notes.

Windlight Updates

R6 brings with it additional Windlight options and a nicely cleaned-up list (WORD->ENVIRONMENT SETTINGS->CUSTOMIZE MY ENVIRONMENT->FIXED SKY) which includes creators’ attributions wherever possible, which is a nice acknowledgement to see. TBH, I can’t specify which of the list are new – as I’ve never actually looked at what was there to start with in Catznip (shame on me, I know), but the release notes refers to them as a “huge stack”, so there should be a lot for regulars to enjoy.

Elsewhere there are nips and tucks – the delay that may be experienced when right-clicking and . or editing an object has gone, so menus, etc. immediately respond, issues around the multi-line chat freezing the word view have been corrected, etc.

Chat also sees any character opening the chat bar or focusing on Nearby Chat when WASD is set to start typing. All I can say on that is “Three cheers!” As someone who has her WASD set for typing rather than movement, the tendency for some Viewers to ignore various keys has been a source of considerable teeth-grinding…

As updates go, this may well appear to be a small one, but it again demonstrates that Catznip remains highly innovative in examining how people actually use the Viewer and its UI on a daily basis and in seeking ways and means to make common tasks easier to access and get on with.

Related Links

Help the Lab help you

Posted on by Inara Pey

The recent TPV Policy changes brought with them the news that the functionality of llRequestAgentStatus, popularly used to obtain someone’s actual on-line status would be changed at some point in the near future as a matter related to users’ privacy.

The ability to determine someone’s on-line status has been the subject of debate for some time now, as evidenced by JIRA SVC-4823.  The JIRA itself has received a lot of attention since the news on the TPV Policy changes broke, which both highlights the level of concern where potentially legitimate uses of llRequestAgentStatus is concerned, but conversely doesn’t help the Lab clearly understand all cases where this is so.

Yesterday, Oz put on a request on the JIRA, thus:

Everyone…. I don’t know if this will help or not, but I’m going to give it a try and see….

We hear what you’ve all said, we understand the issues, and we’re going to discuss what we can and should do about them.

Nothing is final.

We appreciate that Phoenix is moving appropriately to remove the privacy violation from their next release, and hope that they’ll do that soon, but we understand that these things take time.

In order to help us to have a better understanding, I appeal to the many of you who are posting messages that essentially say “I agree – this will be bad for me too” as opposed to describing a specific use case not already described here (and thank you to the many posts that have done a good job describing use cases): please stop with these “me too” posts – they just make it harder to read the full stream (and yes, I at least am reading all of every comment). We know that for every use case there are many users… we don’t need each of them to post something

This is a fair and reasonable request, and while it is understandable the many want to add their name to one or more instances where the function does have a positive use, it’s also essential the LL get a fair chance to establish the how and where and what in terms of what needs to be done in order to avoid causing undue upset or pain in altering the functionality – if indeed this happens.

If you do have a potential user case that hasn’t been listed in the JIRA (or perhaps hasn’t been fully explained), then now is the time to help Linden Lab help you by providing a clear and concise explanation of how the function is used and how altering it could be detrimental to the SL experience. If you just want to add a “me too” comment, without specifics, I would encourage you to consider Oz’s plea and resist the temptation, so that LL stand more of a chance of sifting through the feedback and properly taking all they need to understand into account.

Again, you can reach the JIRA to add your examples by clicking here.