I'm crumped up in the worst sort of despair I've been in since starting SL five years ago in 2004.
I was all prepared to be a bit upbeat about the new viewer, because it does have a few good thing in it -- and then the sharp blow to the solar plexus.
I didn't think they'd do this. But they did.
Search/Places is gone -- in the functional, clean, useful, sales-driving version is used to be in 1.23.
In its place is the awful SEARCH/ALL jumble box that returns a load of crap making it impossible to manage your rentals inventory or your stores ads.
When you find the SEARCH box and click it, to be sure, you can see a PLACES tab -- but you can't go there *first* to get a clean set of returns, you can only go there AFTER you have put a term in SEARCH ALL box.
At this second level, SEARCH PLACES doesn't clean up like the old SEARCH PLACES -- indeed, it is NOT the old functional SEARCH PLACES. If I type in Ravenglass Rentals, I get 10 pages of returns with only 40 search ads because it returns other people's rentals too on the word "rentals". Even closed-quote search produces other rentals in lower relevance farther down the list.
And the returns on the page absolutely suck. The page only gets 3-4 entries at one glance in the available window, not 40 as before. They are distended and stupid, in part because of some strange copy "NEW TO SECOND LIFE? TRY..." showing up on every return. While that nuisance may go, it's hard to see that the engineers will see their way clear to making the results look better with just ONE line visible to fit more returns at a glance, although I suppose one can try...
The worst thing is that I've lost my tool for managing my business. See, the search/places list was how I managed inventory of available rentals, which I update daily, and also monitored traffic at the major communities to see how they were doing. Now I can't see the list, even paging through 10 pages -- it's incoherent as I can't sort it by traffic as I could before of *my own* search/places ads.
Basically, what's happened is I no longer have an interface for myself or my customers to manage my "search/places" ads.
The function to sort by "traffic" doesn't sort *my* listings, but the entire grab-bag of "rentals" so that my listings are buried under the sex palaces. Even whe "places" is clicked.
So essentially, I can't use it as a management tool anymore. Worse, my tenants, who relied on this to freely move around all my rentals, i.e. starting at a newbie place, moving to a cottage, then moving to a waterfront on an island, or back again, or to a new location, now can't see what's there as easily.
To be sure, I have redundancy built into my system. I have the landmarks card networked on locations all over, and I have the portal boards. I'll now have to work all those harder -- before they served the 20 percent who couldn't figure out search or like the ability to save landmarks for later -- but now 80 percent will have to wrestle with the awful search/all or find their way to my office to use the landmarks card.
It means having to spend way more on Classifieds and XStreet -- and of course that's the idea. The Lindens seem to have made a strategic decision to kill search/places because it's only a $30 sink, not a $50 payment or a $25 payment to them, like the Classifieds and Xstreet. I predict search/place fees will plummet, as people won't want to fight to be seen on the viewer with all the wonky returns -- you must all share the space with "classifieds" (search/places used to be clean, without classifieds cluttering the view).
Perhaps in a few days, the shock might wear off, and I might be able to find some compensations for this. Another way to look for land is in groups. So I may figure out a way to label that differently to show what's available. I haven't used that in the past because group land lists load slowly. Perhaps it means breaking up the group again into smaller pieces, something I've already done before a number of times...I now have 12 land groups as it is, and not even space enough on my alt holding land for all these groups.
There's a lot of other pain on the viewer too. Pain. Deep pain. Not lack of building tools pain, but as I predicted, lack of awareness of rentals needs pain. For example gone is the ability to click on the top of the screen to get "about land". I must now draw down a menu and click about 3 times to get to it.
The "name" function showing a list of prim owners is broken on the land menu in the new viewer.
For me, "picks" is not visible to add or edit as other people tell me it is for them (I see their picks, can't see my own).
I'm really feeling a severe squall of depression settling in at the huge mound of work -- redoing help cards, trying to manage my land, losing business because people can't search for my land so easily now, other annoyances and inconveniences. It may be enough to finish me off in SL.
As for the top 10 annoyances, groups are worse than ever, hard to read, broken chat worse than ever.
The only faint light at the end of the tunnel -- and it may be the train coming in the other direction -- is that now "edit" does not open up on top of the object blocking the view, but opens up to to the side. Great! Except edit is harder to get to...And edit *what* on a viewer where no one can find my rentals?
The lab has been making indecipherable changes...or more accuately 'change for the sake of change' for a long time, but this...this...is an abomination! :(
I am not a club-sitter and chatter which is about the only class of player I could even remotely think might like this client. The client is 100% useless for how I play SL and complicates everything...I cannot imagine how it would be for an land manager or estate manger.
EVERYTHING goes through that damnable bar, and it takes 1/4-1/3 of my screen...want inventory open all the time like I do now, lose screen space...want minimap, lose screen space. Chat is all jumbled as is group chat...that tiny little popup bit in the lower right corner. Search isn't useful...
Looks like a poorly executed copy of a third-rate web broswer to me.
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | February 23, 2010 at 07:45 PM
You think you've got a lot of work to do?
I've got to redo an entire orientation tutorial--and since LL appears to be supporting 1.23 for some undetermined length of time--there is a good chance that new users may be showing up with either. So I have to figure out a way for users to toggle between orientations.
Oh--and most of the classes we teach at Oxbridge will require rewriting. And most of the tutorials we've invested in will need to be thrown out or upgrades purchased.
And to top it off, I have probably only four to five weeks before we start getting new people logging in using Viewer 2.0. Its not like LL has given us much time to do all this.
Posted by: Carl Metropolitan | February 23, 2010 at 07:53 PM
I already starting scrambling to put up basics for 2.0 on top of 1.23 and now it's a worst jumble than ever.
This may defeat me.
This reminds me of the months -- years -- it took for me to get used to things after my thumb became permanently crippled in RL. Pain. Suffering.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 23, 2010 at 08:03 PM
No worries. the "haxx0rs" will fix it all and everyone can continue the migration to open sim compatible viewers.
Prok do you really think LL is going to be around a long time? They are walling off their garden and following Forterra into obscurity. Open sim has a model more like the internet. Therefore it will put LL out of business over time IMHO.
And it is obvious this new viewer is fucked up, and the alpha feedback that got leaked shows the feedback was ignored. Therefore this is a sacred cow and it was not written by anyone with any human factors design expertise. The physiological damages that will be racking up are staggering. People will get eye muscle damage and are likely to develop adult ADD from this atrocity. Now LL gets to face the prospects of medical injury related class action lawsuits to go with the rest.
Nothing will be fixed without certain changes being forced on LL in hard ways.
Whatever. Just proves dope smoking retards get paid more than smart skilled experienced engineers. Backwards Life is real Life. The bad guy always wins.
Posted by: AnnOtooleInSL | February 23, 2010 at 08:16 PM
well they dont win, they just take your money and faith if you let them....
Clearly this is a product of those who dont "do biz" in digital virtuality...
Only those who "do biz" selling it.
Ignorance or Strategy? It's getting harder for many now to fake ignorance.
Lets Party like its SL 2006 again:) Isnt that why Scolbe chimed in again ?;)
Posted by: cube inada | February 23, 2010 at 09:14 PM
Right click on the navigation and faves bar to close them; you then have real estate comparable to SL1. I actually prefer the right side menu browser than the old XP style buttons. There’s now more screen area because it’s not cluttered with multiple windows such as chat and inventory. I like the way you can have conversations running along the bottom of the bottom tool bar, having the avatars profile icon as a visual indicator. I find this a lot quicker and easier to manage than the old tabbed chat window. The clickable info icon that details the current parcel your avatar is residing in is clearly aimed at giving information quickly to the visitor rather than in-depth information only useful to a parcel owner. I do feel there should be a buy land button in this section though. The colour scheme is only really suitable for LCD screens with ‘clear-type’ enabled, I would hate to see it on a cathode ray tube. I’m disappointed with search, where has events gone too?
Posted by: Cube Republic | February 23, 2010 at 09:40 PM
Yeah, I can live with it but its borked.
I mostly take screenshots in world and the camera tools were needlessly changed. And I no longer can get 1st person picture to work.
It a lot of searching for the land information which I use to track prims on my land. Its all hidden away. And inspect is gone as well.
This viewer was not made for us long time residents. But it isn't simple enough for a clueless newbie either. I don't know who it was created for.
Posted by: melponeme_k | February 23, 2010 at 10:33 PM
The viewer has a 'Feature' that the first time you go to your profile, you are in an 'Edit' mode, and that's why you can't see your picks. Click 'Cancel' at the bottom to leave edit mode, and magically they appear, and it doesn't happen that way forever after. I guess it's supposed to make people edit their profiles. But I think it's a pretty poor idea.
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | February 24, 2010 at 01:21 AM
Cube wrote in part:
"Ignorance or Strategy? It's getting harder for many now to fake ignorance."
I've been saying that for awhile.
Btw, what's you're take on BM after speaking with Jim? Inquiring minds and all that.
Posted by: AngelaTalamasca | February 24, 2010 at 02:08 AM
This is likely to be another deliberate move on LLs place following the introduction of "Linden Housing" that's designed to steal the market back to them.
Posted by: Untameable Wildcat | February 24, 2010 at 02:33 AM
Well. Ive been unable to get back into BM since i had a bad unistall of the beta. The release versions wont install on my system:( I had two "support tickets" never responded too. So ive been on a BM wait and see.:)
i made a comment about them a few posts back. I still think the same. They have the chicken /egg syndrome now when it comes to content/ and content audience. They ARE talking up a SL like DMCA like biz posture, but at the same time are so high end and platform limited that the "creatives" macs. types are locked out, and the Anshe/Land Prok like have nothing to sell, or manage , or build up yet to maintain and offer others....
SO if they can make it a few years, like the 2003-6 SL years....they could have a 2006-2009 BM bubble....it would be very much a repeat of the SL bubble but have less of a "regular folk doing biz" componant ever forming..-- more a direct path to SL viewer 2.0:)
So ill wait for Jim as promised to help me get back into BM..:) Well chat Im sure, maybe do some biz, im willing, Id bring StarbaseC3 into the mars(spoke to them/ and VCE about this 5 years ago) and play a bit, invest a little effort into the future, i have all the content in collada and waiting for over 3 years:)
ive played and or partnered with everyone web3d for 15 years.. ill play.. will they?
My follow up email goes out this end of week:)
PS. anyone find any major memeory leaks in the new SL v.2? I had my machine go low memory beyond all recovery tonight- first time ever..only new app- todays v.2
:?
Posted by: cube inada | February 24, 2010 at 02:52 AM
Well..I like the direction that LL is taking here.
Far from being crumpled up in despair, my first look at viewer2.0 was a feeling it was more like the familiar web browser look. I has a distinct tingly feeling of 'oo..this is 3D web'. Yeah there is a bunch of re-training for oldbies, and yeah some UI flaws to iron out, but all in all its heading in the right direction in my opinion.
Maybe this will actually take SL mainstream..well lets hope so..good luck LL. I do hope they reveal the protocols behind the new features (web on prim), rather than forcing folk to reverse engineer them. And I do hope they release an enterprise server package, so people can host a region from their own server space. Oh and finish the Open Grid Protocol.
We will see.
Posted by: Micha Sass | February 24, 2010 at 05:39 AM
To be fair though, LL would have appeared 100% more cool, if they had made a Google Chrome plug-in that could give access to the grid. And actually made an effort to have an accepted protocol for linking between grid locations..
But I like their style, and for the next year or so I think they can hog all the users to themselves, and force them to use a LL client. The new in-viewer web browser is way more functional, so maybe people will actually switch to SL2.0 for all their web browsing needs..a proprietary software for all web access..this is a capitalist wet dream, and LL could be the firm to do it..lol..
Linden Lab, the new Microsoft..hehe
Posted by: Micha Sass | February 24, 2010 at 05:49 AM
Oh and as the Asset Server grows to accommodate the entire worlds Virtual Reality..it becomes a towering building full of humming server blades..they rename it the matrix..later on the Asset Server now so big it forces the western coast of America into daily blackouts, the US military step in to regain control...the Asset Server fights back with an army of drones operated by loyal SecondLifers'...The asset server wins, and the US government retreats to a bunker....
holy shit..viewer2.0 is the end of the world as we know it...
/me crumples up in despair....
Posted by: Micha Sass | February 24, 2010 at 05:58 AM
Micha, in future the entire SL grid will be running on a single laptop. And you will all still be paying the same tier fee.
The military will step in to save you all from the effects of the Linden koolaid that has brainwashed everybody into you paying $1000 a month for 500 bytes of server space.
Posted by: Mr T | February 24, 2010 at 07:38 AM
One of the memes the Lindens have always cultivated successfully over the years is to imply that people who don't go along with their changes aren't "evolving" or are "unchanging early adapters" or "oldbies who can't change". The Lindens are oldbies who can't change with their obsession about web 1.0 and making even web 2.0 like web 1.0 instead of realizing they could be out in web 3.0.
Browsers? Why are we still repeating browser memes and grammars of the 1990s?
All that crap about open sim protocols and interoperability of grids -- it's merely the geek rapture fantasy of world domination and it undermines what world they do manage to make and monetarize.
The new viewer isn't about "retraining" when it completely removes functionality, as the search/places cripple does. That isn't about finding a new menu somewhere else, it's about losing a perfectly functioning feature that was vital to business and is now harmed.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 24, 2010 at 09:16 AM
Live events listings and searches are a step further from reach than before.
Landmarks and shopping first, then events.
Ugh. So much for the killer app, use-case, and shared experience.
-ls/cm
Posted by: Crap Mariner | February 24, 2010 at 10:36 AM
cube: Yes 2.0 pegs my CPU cycles to 100% often and I now am sending crash reports again (circa pre-Nicholaz). Waiting for the shoe up the ass to reappear. ~LOL~
Problems aside, like search and real-estate, I do think Linden Lab Research International Inc's."New Architecture", both corporate and code, is now obviously consistent and is DESIGNED to provide an IP platform that the Lab can exploit ahead of the trailing open source communities, I give them cudos for execution this time with Webkit (shared media) and laying the framework for legal action against infringement of "their" IP. It will be time before they have the $ making framework (more acquisitions to come?) in place to "support" meshes.
I did not like Microsoft but they won didn't they.
The question has always been, When will users NEED 3D like they needed a spreadsheet and a word-processor?
Posted by: jeanricard broek | February 24, 2010 at 11:12 AM
----Another poster said-----
I did not like Microsoft but they won didn't they.
----end of quoting----------
Microsoft only won because of their monopolistic licensing practices and aggressive expansion into other markets. LL is far far from a market position that would allow that sort of dominance.
Valves Steam service might be a better comparison. However the percentage of the PC gaming market they control is much smaller than Microsofts near monopoly and is unlikely to rise to that level in the foreseeable future.
Posted by: Ric Mollor | February 24, 2010 at 12:38 PM
Just as AOL Saw itself as THE online hub of all things.
Netscape then set up a strategy to be the WWW Browser/ business of ALL things www.
In affect both were WALLED, one as a technincal/business garden, the other as a business/"less" technincal garden,
Both ended up dead weeds.
And MS doent have the WALLET (paypal)attached to the browser, and even WMP, didnt make video bank, till it was wrapped up in Flash, and packaged by YouTube and Myspace, with content paid for--or on the way to being paid for from Viacom, Fox, etc...
Ecosystems. gardens need them.
V2 is a weed wacker so far for the smaller plants. Note Glenn Linden also has left SL. Even the tallest of the plants, the 500 a year plants.. are now wacked at the roots....
after a while one can really see the end games if you look. machines are predictable...like chess...which is why the computers now can win.
but they cant tell you why they play.
Posted by: cube inada | February 24, 2010 at 02:05 PM
The bad news is that you're right. The Search functionality is broken. For me personally, I'm also quite disgusted by the way Events are handled.
The good news is that all these are Web pages. They're not hard coded. They can be replaced by any Web designer at the Lab, who doesn't even need to know how the viewer works at all. Better than that, they can change the whole Search interface without even releasing a new version of the SL 2.0 viewer! They just need to pack a new web page on top of their Google Search Appliance, and it all works. Now that's cool!
Even cooler is that from now on all in-world HUDs and interactive objects will work exactly the same way. No more need to update complex LSL-programmed devices, which were secretly built by a handful of scripters part of the Ancient Order of the Metaverse and who would not only refuse to reveal their secrets, but make sure they would be only passed along to their brotherhood members after proper initiation. But now any youngling with a rough knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and a bit of Flash can design the next-generation super-cool HUD in a few hours. And of course there are hundreds of millions of Web designers around the world, compared to just a few hundreds of HUD/interactive device creators in SL. LL just levelled the playing field by making content development in SL accessible to a much wider audience.
The realistic news is that this is "just a beta". It's not even a release candidate. Of course there won't be dramatic UI changes until we reach the final version. But I'm pretty sure that shifting a few HTML lines around a web page to fix some stupid mistake is still well within LL's abilities :)
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | February 24, 2010 at 07:01 PM
"Even cooler is that from now on all in-world HUDs and interactive objects will work exactly the same way. No more need to update complex LSL-programmed devices, which were secretly built by a handful of scripters part of the Ancient Order of the Metaverse and who would not only refuse to reveal their secrets, but make sure they would be only passed along to their brotherhood members after proper initiation. "
Um, wow, quite a bit of skew in that statement. There's nothing 'secret' about huds. And there's still many reasons *not* to use HTML on a prim for them.
Not everyone wants to rush out and buy a web server. Not every application would work over the web.
It's a rather grandiose statement to think scripted huds are a thing of the past, and that people who bother to learn to script are some evil cabal controlling the flow of information in Second Life. But thanks for the giggle. :)
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | February 24, 2010 at 08:16 PM
I've mostly been liking it, until I tried to look at my picks. I had to trawl through the forum to find out that there is a bug, when you first click my profile it takes you into edit mode, you have to click cancel at the bottom and then the "My Picks" tab appears.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | February 24, 2010 at 08:24 PM
Bandwidth Gwyneth, bandwidth, what happens when the super cool new hud genius runs out of bandwidth?
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | February 24, 2010 at 08:39 PM
Shsh, Darien! TINC! LOLOL ^_~
Don't know enuf about the underlying arch to comment on the HUD v HTML (likely Flash) bit. Though, some of the features remind me of BM sans the fugly avies. LOL
I do however find it interesting that they've changed up the search to just displaying a web page. As for the search results, someone @ the lab still needs to take a class on how to configure the google appliance. Until then, ppl might wanna educate themselves on "google hacking."
What's interesting is, in their new Viewer 2.0 Q&A, they've stated they will no longer be providing PPC Mac support.
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2010/02/24/answers-to-a-few-faqs-on-viewer-2
Lots of lunge and parries this week.
Posted by: AngelaTalamasca | February 24, 2010 at 09:14 PM