Tag: Firestorm

On Tuesday, February 17th, the Firestorm team launched the latest in their Tool Tip Tuesday series, with Jessica taking a look at Contact Sets.

Contact Sets provide a way to organise your friends – and other people – into sets or categories, using your own criteria. Thus you can create sets of friends, colleagues, business contacts, and so on. They aren’t necessarily for everyone, but for those who are a member of different role-play groups or combat groups, etc., or who need to manage lists of customers or tenants, etc., and perhaps need a quick way of identifying people, they can be very useful.

By assigning a colour to a Contact Set you can, for example, make it easier to identify members of that group in your Friends list or on the mini-map, or through their name tag in-world – or even in group, IM and nearby chat. So identifying a customer or tenant in a crowd becomes very easy, helping to smooth any communications which take place, while spotting people on the mini-map is also made easier.

And if you have problems reading fancy text people sometimes use in their display names, Contact Sets lets you assign an alias to contacts who do, making it it easier for you to identify them without struggling to read their display name.

Contact lists can also be be shared across accounts. This means that if you use alts for a specific tasks (such as customer care) you can copy one or more Contact Sets from one account to another, making the management of your customers that much easier when using your various accounts.

However, the very power found in Contact Sets can make getting to grips with them a little bewildering – so if you’ve ever wondered what they are all about, but have fought shy of diving into them, Jessica’s introductory video should be just the ticket for you. In it she provides an uncomplicated overview of the major features in Contact Sets and demonstrates how to get started within using them.

Should you want to know more about Contact Sets after watching the video, then be sure to check the Firestorm class schedule for lessons on them, and further guidance can be found in the Firestorm wiki.

Jessica Lyon was back on Tuesday, February 3rd with another Firestorm Tool Tip Tuesday video, and this one focuses on the use of the Auto-Replace function, and how it might well be more useful than people might appreciate.

As explained in the video, Auto-Replace can be found under Preferences > Chat > Text Input in Firestorm, and generally under chat in other viewer supporting the same Auto-Replace functionality. It is shipped with two lists: Spelling Corrections, which offers corrections for common spelling errors, and Abbreviations (which is the list I actually use and have customised myself).

The Abbreviations list converts commonly used abbreviations such as bbl, afk, gtg, etc., into their long-hand equivalents (be back later, away from keyboard, got to go, etc.), just by typing-in the abbreviation followed by a space.

So far so good, nothing especially exciting there. But did you know, using Auto-Replace you can:

• Create a custom greeting you can use when working as a greeter or host, or simply on meeting people?
• Combine abbreviation entries to create statements?
• Use abbreviations to display SLurls and URLs in chat without having to type them long-hand?
• Export  / import your lists so you can share them with friends or easily copy them between the computers you use with SL?

If you didn’t – then this video is certainly for you, as Jessica reveals all!

Note that you can use Auto-Replace like this in any viewer that supports the same Auto-Replace functionality as found in Firestorm, including the official SL viewer.

Firestorm is renowned not only for being Second Life’s most popular viewer, but also for the degree of end-user support provided by the viewer team. With multiple language support groups, in-world classes, a wiki, an in-world support regions, and so on, Firestorm offer users a broad range of support options.

On Tuesday, January 27th, Firestorm added to all of this with a new feature on their You Tube channel,  entitled “Tool Tip Tuesday”.  In launching the feature, Firestorm Project Manager Jessica lyon describes it thus:

Firestorm has so many features and functions most folks don’t even know about that we decided to do a series of short videos showcasing a hidden or lesser-known feature once a week.

The first of the new videos is just over six minutes in length and provides tips on  getting more out of the camera, and short cuts which may help make using the camera easier. The tips include:

• Use of the SHIFT and the CTRL/CMD keys with the mouse scroll wheel (if you have one!) to assist in camera movement / placement
• Keyboard options to help with camera placement (e.g. CTRL-0, etc.)
• Use of the main camera floaters (default and Phototools)
• Saving and loading a sorted camera position (which may not be quite what you think it is!).

So why not take a look at the first video in the series and keep a note of Tip Tool Tuesday? Even if you don’t use Firestorm, you may be surprised by what you find.