De-Fanging Viewer 2.X

Viewer 2.0 and subsequent updates (2.X) bites.

Here's some tips to defang it.

Before changing to viewer 2.X, CAUTION!

o Make a copy of your current outfit in a separate folder to pull on yourself later. 2.X is notorious forlosing your skins, or stripping off all or some of your clothes and attachment, so make sure you can easily assemble it again.

o Save your character folders on your hard drive from user/apps/roaming/SL name because otherwise
installing 2.X will WIPE OUT ALL YOUR CHAT LOGS. NEVER TO BE RETURNED. The installation overwrites and destroys them. So save them out of your game folders.

o Get your work done on 1.x first. You will be in for a long and tiresome session where you can't get
anything done.

Now you're ready to log into 2.X. Type your full name in the USER name box (see where they were going with this!) not the two boxes, as both names go in the one box, and the password in the other.

o Be prepared for grey squares, slow loading, Caspering (you're a white blur), etc. 2.x is nasty. In fact,
the way to keep yourself in mud and ghosts is to keep going back and forth between the two. The
Lindens admit this. You have to entirely uninstall 1.x and grit and go with 2.x if you don't want visibility
problems. But geez, don't do that yet, you've got work to do and you will not be getting it done on two.

Here are some of the main NESTED HORRORS as Zha Ewry aptly calls them

o "Chat chiclets". These are called "chiclets" because they are like tiny annoying little pieces of gum.

All your chat and your talking objects (your rental boxes) and all things communicating are all bunched
up in a ridiculous wad down in the lower right hand corner, instead of tabbed, visible, and workable
across the top. Used to treating IMs like tickets, keeping them open until you solve the customer's
problem? You can't do that any more. So get a separate work email, give your customers that work
email, put it on your picks and leases and hunker down for some serious annoyance with chat.

-- not everyone popping into your face in this wad is actually talking to you, as I discovered when I
responded to a Linden I thought was talking to me. Whenever somebody makes one of those group-
chat things out of their calling cards, ALL their cards show, regardless of whether the person is talking
or not. Nice way to out their friends list, aside from the annoyance factor. This creates messages like
"42" or "79" that terrify you when you log on and think those are all individuals trying to reach you. They
aren't. They are just *every individual line of chat from every single person in that group chat list*.

Did you wonder why 2.X is often described as an act of violence on residents?

o The big goddamn nuisance on the right -- sidebar, panel, whatever -- that THING. You can't miss it.

This...thing is basically everything you will have to work with in SL now, but it will not be detachable
and moveable, like the old menus are. So if you want to do one thing, like open your inventory to fetch
something, and another thing, like push that inventory to a friend, whoops, you can't move the first to
get out of the way of doing the second.

So face up to the fact that you will have to open more windows, and plan more.

This thing can fan back like an accordian and get out of your face, but you'll have to keep remembering to collapse it by hitting the arrow at the top.

o Trying to give a customer a notecard

Your first contact with Nested Horror in 2.X might be when you try to help a newbie with a card or give a customer their customized lease or help card. Oops, that's no longer easy like it used to be.

There are several ways of backing into this.

- IF you are ALREADY talking to a customer, i.e. they've IM'd them or you've managed to find them in the wonky search list and pulled up an IM, then you'll need to go to SHARE, a button on the left in the IM box, click and then see DRAG ITEMS FROM INVENTORY HERE on a space that looks like you're going to be landing a helicopter on a postage stamp.

- Go over to that big annoying bar on the right and click on the suitcase icon. You might not have thought of that icon as representing INVENTORY since it might mean TRAVEL, i.e. explore the world to you, but it's where your stuff is. This is your precursor of the interoperability with other grids the Lindens will be forcing on you one day.

- Find the thing you need to push to your friend or customer in inventory. Right-click and push it down to that little landing area. There will not be a message "So and so has received your inventory" as far as I can tell, so hope for the best.

- If you aren't already chatting, now you're faced with finding that person in Search, which is annoying because you can't click SEARCH and immediately the People tab, you have to type their name into SEARCH ALL in the upper right hand corner, then get the tabs to refine the mess of returns.

-- Another way is to right-click on the object itself and select SHARE and that gives you a menu of a list of FRIENDS and NEAR ME (this is one of the few if any values of the NEAR ME annoyance). If you are trying to move inventory to a non-friend not in your list, use the SEARCH on that CHOOSE RESIDENT BOX. Keep in mind the search in this box can load slowly.

-- WATCH OUT because instead of being able to pause as you physically drag inventory on to an avatar profile as you used to, and see if you're dragging the right thing to the right person, you will instead get a question ARE YOU SURE which you might be inclined to irritably click YES to, and then whoops, you've sent the wrong thing to the wrong person. So when it's saying ARE YOU SURE, go back and look at inventory and resident name.

-- Let me walk you through the way you USED to do it which you will reach for instead of these other two ways I just told you, to show you how to avoid frustration there.

-- If you click on an avatar profile, or fetch an avatar profile in search, it opens up over that big nuisance bar on the right -- naturally, covering all your work, and covering that previous view of your inventory with the little suitcase you just had with the arrow poised with your inventory to push to your friend. Sigh.

-- OK, so now you have your friend's profile pulled up, blocking your inventory. You can back out, toggle back to inventory, and use those first two methods or perserve through the nested horror which will follow a familiar groove for you at least.
- Go to the very bottom of the screen, lower right corner. You will see a little arrow pointing downward. Here, you have to "just know" that underneath that arrow, is the option SHARE. You have to "just know" because I "just told you".

-- But tread carefully here. Clicking share *while having the avatar profile selected* does pop in a view of your inventory list over that previous view. It will go to the first item in the previously open folder you had from some previous task and will move that unless you stop.

-- You will see your search results for that avatar as another screen that seems as if the profile is now open for you to drag your  inventory to. But you can't. It won't go. because it's not the profile, but a search result.

-- So back you go to RIGHT CLICK on that item you want to share in inventory and follow the menu to get to the People Picker or the friend and push the inventory.

You might be feeling really tired and your nerves are frayed now, so go have a drink, a smoke, whatever, while you brace yourself for trying to manage groups.

o Right click on your avatar, and you get a list of groups with their icons. Some of them will be grey as they rez in slowly -- the whole idea is retarded.

-- Realize that you will not have a nice list to toggle around with but are going to have that same "obliterate my previous work" problem of that big annoying bar on the right to deal with one group at a time.

-- I find cursing down to the group and clicking on the "i" arrow is better than right-clicking to get a list. It puts up a the first page of the group menu to change the charter and also gives a view of names.

-- It's on this menu -- remember, it was accessible from the "i" and arrow after selecting the group -- that you can see MY TITLE now in the middle of the page to toggle and give people different titles -- before it was at the bottom of the page.

-- ON this view of the menu you need to select "show in search" and also I would advise "General Content". The reason is that if you put "Mature Content" because the group is on Mature land or for Mature rentals, many customers will not find the group when you tell them to join on their own or go to it to change titles or simply view it. It will not show up for them in search because they will not have thought to check MATURE as an option for their search (especially newbies). This is not curable for customers. Therefore take your group out of Mature and put it to GENERAL so it can always be found.

If you have an adult chat group, well, what can you do, your chances of being abuse reported over a *group* showing as General as distinct from a build or activity on land are very minimal. Customers first!

o Have I mentioned a really, really awful thing? You can no longer see payment events as a big blue screen dropping down from your all-important majority-of-humans right-lookers' spot in the upper right-hand corner. I'm all for getting rid of the blue-screen horror. But it hasn't been replaced by a visible message that surfaces well. That means when someone buys your product or pays for your rentals, you can't instantly greet them, answer questions, send them cards as they take their place in that huge scrum of chat, objects talking, etc. in your "chiclet" space.

-- So, instead, the payment notices are mixed up with that nested horror called the Chiclets, which I now think of as an especially raucous girl grunge band bunched up on stage in ugly clothes with purple hair.  So along with all the chatting crap, there's your customers paying and possibly also messaging you saying "I paid, and nobody is telling me what to do!". So again, you need to keep clicking on that nested horror and see what's happening in it and trying to close all the Xs on it. From what I gather, nobody has figured out yet how to stretch it out as a series of tabs on the top of your screen like the old viewer.

o Are you wondering about now how to get rid of some of these really chatty group calling-card people? Let me warn you: deleting their card does not delete your card from their group and you will keep seeing their huge chat that is now unbearable on 2.X. You'll have to call them and tell them to delete you. Tell them you are suffering from macular degeneration and epilepsy and cancer, and can't risk a seizure or stroke from their chiclets, and they'll understand.

o So now are you wondering how do you LEAVE a group that chats a lot, like some of my pet groups, which I join and leave as and when needed?

Um, I have an idea. Go back to 1.23 and do that. Because I don't see how you leave a group on 2.X. I looked and looked and there is no LEAVE button on the group -- well it no longer feels like a group because it is no longer a separate thing with operations, it's now a list on that brown annoyance over to the right which covers up all your other work.

There's one more thing I'll tell you before running back to 1.23 screaming, because I have work to do:

o How to see prims on land. Also works differently in 2.X and is annoying.

-- Click on the very top of the screen in what looks like a browser URL box in the "i".
-- No, it won't instantly give you the about land menu, more's the pity.
-- But if you go over to the Annoying Sidebar, in the middle of the panel you will see ABOUT LAND.
-- Click on the OBJECTS tab
-- No, you won't see the list of all your tenants' prims. For that, you have to "just know" that you have to click the little "refresh-like arrow" in the middle of the screen.
-- Careful not to click the RETURN OBJECTS button which is very close to the "just let me see the damn list of prim owners" arrow -- they are dangerously close to one another. And you will have to keep coming back to clicking on this for each new teleport or sim or parcel.

I've had enough for now -- perhaps you can add something or I may have some stamina tomorrow.
 

Comments

[cube inada]

well for me its simple...
it refused to load the webmedia .dll during an install of 2.11 weeks ago...since then, even after recent removals and installs i can no longer see search or any html based interface elements... if not fixed.. and when other viewers are no longer working, ill be on robot avatar only. just acccessing my web account to convert to lindens to paypal till the machine stops...
ill have no more inworld access...
frankly 1.235? well when thats gone..ill be.

[brinda Allen]

That's so GD funny! Except it's really true and sad.
You know...I love Secondlife..I really do.
I had hoped sometime ago that the platform would never grow stale...that it would continue to evolve and I could just grow old here {well older}

I have recently made statements/promises that I really hope I won't have keep.

If the time comes that the only way to access Secondslife is through viewer 2.ought oh....?

Quote: cube inada
"ill have no more inworld access...
frankly 1.235? well when thats gone..ill be."

I will refund my residents tier... and take my $5880.00USD yearly tier and go.
I do realize that the success or failure of Linden Research certainly doesn't depend on six thousand dollars...but it's all I can do.

[Ace Albion]

You can open a new, resizable and movable inventory window from the little menu buttons at the bottom of the sidebar inventory view. Which is a pain because you have to go do that every time, but you can do it.

The easiest way I've found to give stuff to people is to have an IM window open to them (so choose the IM option from people search/profile, or use an existing open IM if you've been talking to them) then drag the item from the inventory onto the IM chat area. I've never seen, much less used any "share" button, and that method sounds horrifically convoluted.

[Nina Andrews]

Thanks! This whole 2.0 thing has been horrible for an older resident like myself. It's really put me off logging in. But I know I've got to bite the bullet and adapt.