SL Rants 2.0

That's it, "SL 2.0" is out of its closet. No more NDA prevents people from talking about it. Honestly, I think it should better have stayed in its closet. I just can't stand the thing!

First thing you should notice are the "fugly" colors. (Fuzzy and ugly.) It's all dark grey with a little touch of greyish dull green... and black. Let's not forget the black that you can't miss.

Nevermind. I've been fixing the skin of all my clients since the first day it became possible. Let's start.

First thing to do is to check the preferences in the "Me" menu. (Weird name...) They have been stripped down a lot! But I still found a good thing: You can disable the "dead cow" animation from here. I mean you can easily prevent your avatar from going AFK/Away when idle. Apart from that, nothing really interesting in here. And especially not the "fugly" default colors for chat and IMs.

Let's log in.

I won't mention the fact that the whole plugin system silently failed so that I don't have anything HTML based. This is just a bug, not one of the million hindrances of that clunky viewer.

My avatar took forever to rez. It reminded the old days when you could be "ruthed" from a few seconds to forever. Enabling the HTTP textures doesn't really improve things (The option is in the Advanced menu.) and the cache is still so borked and useless.

Now that you're in-world, you suddenly realize that you need that wonderful 30" screen you can't afford. The bottom bar has shrunk to a single line but that's only to give more room to the top bar which floats like a dark ceiling over your head. There are 2 new lines: the browser-alike navigation bar and the favorite bar. Both are deactivatable but without the navigation bar, you just can't see easily where you are. And when those bars are activated, they shrink the view.

And the navigation bar is really useless. You can go back and forth amongst places you visited but you never know where. There is a button with a down arrow at the end of the URL bar. It seems to be here to show your history. (It doesn't work.) You'll have to use the monster sitting silently, hidden beyond the right border of your screen. Not yet!

First, let's chat a little. Prepare to suffer!

Forget about reading anything that is beyond 3 words. Chat messages appear in a tiny solid black box the size of a post stamp. And to make things worse, by default, the name of the talker appears with the picture of their profile reduced to a tiny icon atop the text. Meaning: There isn't much room already but a large space is wasted for nothing.

Run to the preferences. Chat tab. Enable plain text chat history. The name isn't very descriptive of what the option does but that will turn back the chat to old style with name and text on a single line. (It will also apply to the IMs.)

If you don't have the time to read a sentence, you can open the Chat history... and cry. What you get is a solid black box obscuring a quarter of your screen in the bottom left corner. You can move it but that's all. It will hide another quarter of your screen elsewhere. What a choice!

I hope you didn't forget to watch also the bottom right corner of your screen. That's where IMs appear. Tiny solid black boxes popping with a flash of color and sound if you haven't already disabled what the Preferences call "Buttons sounds". The text isn't squeezed in its tiny box, it's just cut. Since you can't read anything in here, let's open the IM window. You just have click the blob of pixels (Profile picture reduced to a 16x16 icon). Please, be nice with Linden Lab and don't laugh at the wasted space used to show the profile picture, just click the button to hide it.

Before a second avatar sends you an IM, let's run to the preferences and enable the tabbed IMs. When you have a row of blobs of pixels to choose from, things tend to become quite fuzzy. Without mentioning that if you don't do that, each thread of IM will require its own solid black window. You just don't have enough room. You haven't seen the monster on the right side of the screen yet!

Chat is a pain and so are IMs. What was wrong with the Communicate window? You could easily switch in between chat and IM threads, start new ones. Everything what easily accessible in one place. Must be one of those examples of non-broken fixed things.

The system notifications also appear in the same corner than the IMs, they aren't cut but they can be worse than IMs: They steal the focus and block you if they contain a button. Really unpleasant. And Linden Lab forgot one little thing: The dialog to accept, decline or mute inventory offers. Now, somebody can spam you with inventory offers, you won't have the time to see your IMs and your inventory will explode under the flood without you being able to do anything. Even without going to such extremes, you still have to go and dig into your inventory to retrieve whatever somebody just gave you. Really not fun.

I haven't tested the dialogs but I read you must chase them if other notifications appear before you had the time to click anything. Must be "fun".

Now, let's talk about the monster. All the rest is just minor nuisances compared to what we have here: The toaster. (It seems to be the official name.) There is a row of tiny vertical tabs that make a giant thing appear. One third of your screen, full height. Non resizable. Solid black. And the killing detail: When you open it, your whole view is squeezed to the left. Come on! Give me the name of the one who had this idea, I want to make sure he/she never touch this client any more.

The tabs are: "Toggle", to open/close the thing but you can also close by using the currently highlighted tab. "Home", the page Linden Lab doesn't know what to do exactly yet. "My profile", which is so very useful to be able to access in one click. "People", with your friends and groups. "Places", with your landmarks and your teleport history. "Inventory", explicit. "My appearance", since you really really want to change it every minute so it's now accessible in one click.

Seriously, "My profile" and "My appearance" are useless in here. They are also located in the "Me" menu.

There are two new things in the "People" tab: "Near by" which is a rudimentary radar up to 130m and "Recent" to re-open IM threads you closed. Two good additions for the Communicate window... if it were still there.

"Places" is the tab to which the most attention has been given. It's really well done. You have access to your landmark folder, you can retrieve all the ones lost in your inventory, select favorites and navigate in your teleport history. You can even search.

Nothing to say about "Inventory", no real change except that now all the folders are the same.

Now, the reasons that make this thing totally unusable. Everything opens in it. Land informations in the "Places" tab, avatar's profiles in the "People" tab, object informations over the "Inventory". You can only have one opened at any time. How do you drop an item over somebody's profile? Huuu... You either have to start an new IM thread or to open a second inventory window. That makes really sense.

One stupid thing is that despite the huge place taken by this monster, the profiles and the picks are all cut and you have to click a button or the "more" link to be able to see then completely. Ridiculous. The profiles and picks in the previous clients were much better.

And with all that solid black all around the world view reduced to a post stamp, claustrophobia is getting closer and closer. You edit and object, open your inventory, answer an IM and that's it, you're separated from the world by a wall of solid black.

The worst thing is that Linden Lab took 8 months to do nothing. The leaked informations from June 2009 show pretty much what is in this new client. Minus some cosmetic changes. At that time, Alexa Linden crucified the thing in a very lengthy mail.

Nothing has really changed. Now, Snowglobe just got visited by the SL 2.0 revisionists and inherited from the same awful UI, loosing all its improvements and patches in the process.

Last nail to the coffin: A comment from Q Linden on the Jira about the possibility to have the old UI. In simple words: No. Never. Don't even ask.

"Hi, folks. I'd like to explain why you won't see this implemented in Viewer 2 (or probably any 2.x viewer).

The UI isn't just a layer. It's not just a bunch of buttons whose arrangement is arbitrary – we just put something like 50 person-years into development of this product, and a pretty good chunk of that was the design and implementation of the new UI. The interaction design of the new sidebar, the new menu systems, the inspectors. (...)

I don't wish to deny that some people like some features of prior viewers, nor do I contend we got everything right the first time. But the request in this issue is both technically infeasible and not the direction we intend to go. Therefore, I am closing this issue. (...)"

Linden Lab just don't care about their users. They fully respect their long tradition of shoving things down our throats, asking for comments, and ignoring them.

So long and thank you for all the fish. I'm going to find a 3rd party client.