October 2020 WUG summary with SL Mobile news

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, October 7th, 2020. These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the Web User Group wiki page.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

• This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
• Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract.

Web Properties Updates

The primary focus remains on uplift work, and while there have been updates to some of the user-facing web properties and image updates for web pages to reflect the season, and some new pages for events such as the September Titmouse event (see: Second Life to have a smashing time with Titmouse) there was not much to report.

There should be more news on web updates available at the next WUG meeting in November.

General Uplift Notes

See also my recent TPV Developer meeting and CCUG meeting notes.

In general, the Lab’s aim is to have all uplift work completed by the year-end.

• This is getting all services and properties running via cloud services without additional work on making improvements (unless it makes specific sense to make changes as a part of the uplift process, as we saw with region crossings recently).
• Improvements will follow-on from the initial uplift work as the Lab gains greater familiarity with running services in the cloud.
• Similarly, there are no plans to offer new land products or alter the capabilities of the existing region types on completion of the uplift (although it has been indicated elsewhere these may come over time in the future).
• There will obviously be a resumption in region availability once the uplift work has been completed.
• The end-of-year target is a fairly “hard” target, with the caveat that the unexpected can happen to delay things – although that doesn’t appear to have happened thus far.

Mobile Client

iOS

• The iOS version of the mobile client was submitted to Apple for review – and was rejected. LL is currently working to address the issues as a part of Apple’s review.
• Once this has been done, the app will again go through LL’s QA process and then be re-submitted to Apple for evaluation / App Store listing,
• The version currently remains available to those on the closed Alpha only.
• Interestingly, the Lab’s data suggests to them that the number of users with iOS is slightly greater than those with Android, although it’s not clear had this data is derived.

Android

• The android version is still being developed, but remains “some way” behind the iOS version.
• Currently it is not ready for any user-based testing.

General Points of Note

Please also refer to my periodic SL Mobile updates, which are made as and when there are significant updates in the status of the client.)

• It is initially intended to be a communications app, aimed at allowing those who are away from their their usual means of access Second Life to communicate with friends via IM.
• This means that the initial release will not have capabilities such as world rendering, support for making sales / purchases through it, etc.
• However, the client will be enhanced over time.
  • Group and group chat functionally were specifically mentioned, so might be the first set of enhancements.
  • Inventory management was also mentioned, as is apparently being considered, but is described as having its own “own bucket or twelve of worms”, so no decision on if / when it may appear has as yet been made.

As an aside, for those who point to the likes of Lumiya and its capabilities and ask why the LL client isn’t offering the same right from launch, it’s worth remembering that Lumiya took several years to develop its capabilities  iteratively – it wasn’t launched with all of its features fully-fledged.  This is the route the Lab is trying to take with their mobile client.

Marketplace

Demos

• In general, demo version of items on the Marketplace should be linked to the full version.
• There are reports that since making demo items filterable in search, there has been an increase in unlinked demo items
• It’s not clear if this is because people are trying to avoid the filter, or that incoming new merchants simply don’t understand they can link demos to full versions, or even if it is a functional limitation of the filter to pick-up all demo items.
• The Lab will take a look at this, and ideas on how to improve the information given on creating listing are requested via feature request.

Suggestions

A number of suggestions for the MP were put forward at the meeting:

• Add a feature similar to see on the old XStreetSL marketplace: a request for purchasers of items to provide a review.
• Provide a means by which creators can enable a report their last log-in date on their stores / listings. The idea here is to increase the confidence of purchasers that they will receive after-sales support, etc., should it be required.
• An option for a “Show Only # Star Reviews” (where # is the number of stars) and / or to show a summary of star reviews by #of stars (as with Amazon product listings).
• LL have requested these all be submitted as feature requests.

Last Names

• Last Names are still seeing a good response from Premium users.
• LL might opt to offer a new selection of names to reflect the time of year – but again, this would be dependent upon the current volume of uplift work.
• Currently, the Lab has around 10,277 names that could potentially be used over time.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, November 4th, 14:00 SLT.