2.0
I've been resolutely trying to get used to it because I have a feeling this will more or less be it, but I think that the social engineering makes it more attractive to the people whose inworld activities it was made to enhance than to me.
The multiplicity of viewers is great, but there is a Tower of Babel effect if there isn't a common one that everyone knows and about which they can share information, especially with new people. Mostly because of Combat Cards and Ambat, I need to know what people are seeing so I can help them, so will persevere. When I am forced back to another viewer to, say, change permissions on an object, using it has a holiday feeling.
I'm ok with the rearranging, but a lot of things I do will now require digging to access the commands. There are quite a few broken bits (snapshots, for one, permission setting for another, the inability to suppress the UI for a third, the media buttons are backwards, landmarks in notecards can't be used, no Flycam indicator, hard to deselect, runaway scrolling in inv search) that I hope will be fixed soon, and some things that may or may not be changed which make things harder for me personally (Search in inventory can't be separate from Search in Recent, the media controls are bizarrely sited, hard to build except on the ground). I miss hovertips (all) horribly but am just sucking it up.
There are some nice UI changes like right click copy and paste, and... erm.... other things I can't think of at the moment (no, Shared Media and alpha skins and tattoo layers don't count).
The UI is a bit intrusive; when I am attaching something to a notice and have black opaque sidebar, inventory window, chat, minimap, and whatever else is spitting itself onto my screen there's very little SL left, and the panes demand my attention. As I said before the sides of my view into SL have always felt unblocked and akin to the view from my eyeballs - peripheral vision doesn't really apply, so I'd rather say it just felt like I could go left or right and the way was unblocked. Now it does feel a bit like the way I feel if I stand in rl with a wall next to the right side of my head.
/me tries to resist KLee's siren call.
I honestly can't WAIT for server 1.38 to arrive, though. Opensource Obscure's Land/Sky patch is the only 2.0 mod I'm doing at the moment as it's so freaking convenient for me. Because I spend a great deal of time on Aditi I get to look at script info to my heart's content.
Update: This is an old jira comment but explains things:
Q Linden added a comment - 24/Feb/10 08:46 PM
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. It's more than just "skin-deep", to coin a phrase.
We deliberately chose not to implement skins in Viewer 2 – in part because we didn't have the staffing to do multiple skins at the same time as we were doing a major redesign. But even if we had skinning – we still wouldn't have the tools to go back to the old UI.
Even if it were technically feasible (which it isn't under this architecture), the number of bugs we'd be likely to find from inconsistencies between the UIs, not to mention the QA load to test multiple UIs, would doom the project before it began.
And finally, this note: many people at LL didn't like the new UI when they first encountered it, including me. I didn't want to give up 1.23 – I was the lead engineer on the project! But I've found that after I got used to it, I really don't want to go back. Those old comfy shoes don't actually fit so well any more.
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. Please don't reopen it to argue – I'm trying to be honest about the disposition of the issue.
If you have specific changes you'd like to see, please file separate JIRAs for them so that we can consider them individually.
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PLZ LEEVE A MEZZAGE KTHNXBAI