Lance gives an update on the Dolphin Viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

dolphin-logoWith Server-side Baking / Appearance starting to be enabled on the grid, the only two maintained viewers not to be SSB/A enabled are Dolphin and Imprudence.

I recently covered the state-of-play with Imprudence, and the fact that the team plan to ramp-up the viewer to support all of the new SL  capabilities and viewer changes, including CHUI, materials and SSB/A, but it is liable to be some time before they actually get there.

Now Lance Corrimal, the man behind Dolphin, has provided an update on the status of that viewer. The main part of his blog post reads:

I’m sure there are one or two people wondering what is going on with the Dolphin Viewer lately.

To put it simply, my life has been quite hectic the last few months, and it still is. I have a new job that demands a lot of my time and attention. I’ve moved to a different province because of the job, and when I am actually home (the new job involves a lot of travelling), I’m just too damned tired to spend time on working on the viewer.

That being said, there will be a new version, that will have all the new shinies from the Lab. The CHUI interface, SSA, Materials, you name it.

Just … please do not ask me when. “When it is finished” is all I can say right now.

So – SSB/A and more will all be coming to Dolphin – soon. Just give Lance a little room to breathe as the dust of a busy real life settles around him.

He also notes that Dolphin users seeing the advisory warning users of a mandatory viewer update which is displayed on the splash should be aware that clicking on the link will download the official SL viewer, not an updated version of Dolphin.

The splash screen advisory - comes from LL, and will download the official viewer, not Dolphin
The splash screen advisory comes from LL (along with the rest of the splash screen), and will download the official viewer, not an updated version of Dolphin

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

6 thoughts on “Lance gives an update on the Dolphin Viewer”

  2. CHUI, i use it sometimes on kokua . but its a terrible interface to work with.And i think i speak for many i know and still use imprudence. keep chui out :O

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  4. um, chui is the one with the “do not disturb” mode, meaning you can recieve no messages at all, but all will be saved for later viewing. while in do not disturb you can however still recieve inventory, so no problems shopping or working with texture organizers as in the old style ‘busy’ mode. Also CHUI lets you set separate types of notifications for each kind of incoming message. for example, i use an icon flash for local, a ding sound for inventory and no notification for any other kind of message, though all that occur while i am in do not disturb even if it’s hours and hours ago are still there for me to read IF i want to when i open up the communications tab. So while i am not trying to talk anyone into liking it or agreeing with me or anything, from my experience CHUI is the NOT intrusive (note emphasis on NOT intrusive lol) communications in SL to end all (so far) attempts at not intrusive communications options. Or put another way, if you were using CHUI and you found it intrusive, you were doin’ it wrong.

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    1. CHUI is always going to divide people, sadly, as so much about it is going to come down to a subjective viewpoint coupled with a willingness to adopt to new ways of doing things.

      As I mentioned over on the Exodus post thread, I’ve actually drifted away in my overall fondness for CHUI because there are aspects to it which are – to me – annoying.

      One the one hand (and looking at the pluses) I love the capability of sharing an IM session with two or more other people without the frustating, growling and desk-thumping of the old “conference call” system. Do Not Disturb is also great, and both of these are aspects I’m hoping feed through to Firestorm.

      On the other hand do miss the chiclets, and find CHUI’s notification options poor by comparision. I also have to say that I actually do find the CHUI floater intrusive. Sorry. This has nothing to do with doing it right or wrong, it is purely down to what I’m used to and how I prefer to work. I like having my conversation floater open to chat with people while doing other things (such as building, flying, sailing). In this regard, CHUI isn’t as convenient to me (please note the emphasis) as something like Firestorm’s conversations floater, where I can track IMs, chat, and have the majority of my screen free to do other things. CHUI’s approach to vertical tabbing, however, means I have no choice but to extend out the floater to the right, and that eats screen space unnecessarily. I can only guess at the amount of space lost to laptop users with smaller screens and running the medium or large font options …

      Yes, the CHUI screen can be compressed down – but reducing it to just a column of icons means constantly sliding it out and in, which somewhat defeats the purpose in having it open.

      BUT again, on the other hand (or third hand, if you happen to be a member of the Beeblebrox family…), CHUI is substantially better than anything the v2/v3 SL viewer has ever had.

      However, even all this from me is still subjective :).

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  5. I think I can some up my feelings pretty quickly.

    I’m sticking with Firestorm. I don’t want another UI change, thank you very much. And I am afraid that Linden Labs looks like a continuing example of Open Source NIH Syndrome. Did they even look at what Firestorm was doing? I doubt we will ever know why CHUI and Firestorm do so many of the same things in different ways.

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