It's Not Easy Being Green
I haven't used Emerald at all for months but I never really used it a lot. It felt a bit too full of things I didn't need and I never felt entirely ok about its devs, and there were other choices (not as many now as formerly, but approved/not-yet-approved viewers include V2°, 1.23°, KLee's¹, Snowglobe°, Imprudence², Emergence³ (which I think of as "Emergency"), and my current interest Kitty Viewer⁴ make a good enough group at the moment). I never felt the pull of Emerald the way many seem to; it's symbolic to many of in-the-know status, I think.
It used to be a matter of some thought, deciding if a TPV's dev team was trustworthy or would steal your password, drain your account, and commit permabannable offences with your avatar. I think it became a simple matter of wanting to be in with the in crowd, as they thought, unfortunately, and many then and even now think everything is fine. The viewer itself was very good at one time, but less good lately I think, from everything I heard. It had some bugs and bloating, on top of its dubious provenance (well to be honest it wasn't dubious - we all knew it was built by people with at least one foot over the line).
Off topic, but I saw Chestnut Rau's tweet saying she was shocked that Oz Linden didn't know how to sit down properly.* Very few Lindens spend much time at all inworld, but you would think any Linden attached to the viewer development would need to. That reminds me (off-off-topic) that the sort of flakey-pastry or shardlike quality of multiplicity of the outfits, which link in a hall of mirrors in my inventory, has a cousin in the now-multiple name layers. And in the "dig through five layers to get anywhere" UI scenario.
° Linden Lab
¹ KirstenLee Cinquetti
² Jacek Antonelli et al
³ LordGregGreg Back (not approved)
⁴ Katharine Berry (not approved)
Also Hippo (not approved) and Meerkat (not approved) - I need to see if anything has been shaking with them lately. Update: Meerkat was discontinued and Hippo is active but unchanged since April 2010.
Other discontinued viewers include Boy Lane's Rainbow, Henri Beauchamp's Cool Viewer, and the former beloved viewer that is long gone, Nicholaz Beresford's Nicholaz Viewer.
There are light-weight clients too, including Latif Khalifa's Radegast, in the LL TPV Directory.
* Actually the mouse-over icons were missing at one time in V2 - maybe that was when he came aboard, although that isn't an excuse.
posted by
- 12:37 AM
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PLZ LEEVE A MEZZAGE KTHNXBAI