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The Archives
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10.16.08New Second Life Viewer Let’s You Touch PrimsTateru at Massively has flagged the availability of a new viewer and includes the list of fixes, changes, improvement and other miscellany - and the list is almost mind-boggling in its length. Aside from lots of incremental usablity fixes (and I'm all for incremental as long as they're, um, incrementing in the right direction) there are a few things that I think are highlight changes with the new viewer: Support for Mono It's finally here. Took time to arrive but you can finally compile or recompile scripts using the Mono engine. . Originally promised for the first quarter of the year, Mono is ...
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10.01.08New Second Life User Interface: With Vectorform, Will It All Be Surfaces?M Linden recently announced that the user interface for Second Life is being redesigned, making it "more user friendly" and while I scoured the forums I didn't see the name of the firm announced by the Lab. All indications are, however, that Vectorform may be extending its work with the Lab to a larger project that includes the viewer - and the hot bed for all this deep thought may not be California but...Detroit (or at least partially). (Click above for larger image, from Vectorform Web site). And Vectorform needs YOU. Well, they need you if you live in the Detroit area I ...
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09.29.08Linden Lab Announces New Interface for Second Life ViewerEdit: Headline changed - the viewer changes will be primarily interface but could include "carefully considered" changes to the underlying code base. See M's comments on the SL forums. Mark Kingdon announced that an outside design firm is hard at work on a new, user-friendly viewer for Second Life. The announcement comes in a longer update on his progress since taking the helm 4 months ago, and ironically was posted at the same time as I was sitting on a panel discussion about Philip's vision for Second Life. And what's interesting is that while the panelists all seemed to think that Philip ...
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09.01.08Second Life and the User Interface: Toward Strategic ValueThe Second Life viewer could be a source of deep strategic value for Linden Lab, but like many of their tentative and opaque attempts at open source, community management and involvement, and Grid improvements it's instead a floundering off-shoot suffering from a lack of vision and direction. Now, I come at this from a bias: I've spent more time thinking about the User Interface for Second Life and OpenSim than most people - and I've long held the opinion that although there's friction created through the user interface there are far more challenging things that cause attrition in the first hour ...
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08.15.08User Interface Tutorials Launched by Linden LabLinden Lab has launched browser-based tutorials within the Second Life viewer. The interface-based tutorials were tested against orientation island, and Erica Linden called the result of the test a "tie": new users who were directed to Orientation Island (OI) had "as successful" an experience as those who bypassed OI but were given the client with the tutorials. Continue Reading...
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08.12.08Second Life User Interface Contest – Features from the EntriesNew World Notes has just posted an article on the UI design contest highlighting one feature from each entry - features that I somewhat arbitrarily chose to show the breadth of ideas and the quality of submissions. Go have a look, and comment on which features you'd like to see in the user interface.
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07.03.08Interface Design Contest FinalistsThe interface design contest set out to solicit the creativity and expertise of the folks who know Second Life the best - its users. The quality of the submissions has been wonderful, inspiring, and has provided so many ideas for discussion that I've puzzled over how to best present them ahead of the presentation and panel discussion with the judges. So first, thank you so much for your interest, your submissions, and your comments as we move towards judging! While the contest set out to design a new "GUI", the thought process was perhaps as important to many who entered as the ...
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06.17.08800,000L UI Design Contest: Update & Judges AnnouncedI recently launched a contest to design a "newbie-friendly" version of the Second Life client. The intention of this contest is to generate ideas, discussion, and to perhaps facilitate the actual creation of a new client to help remove one of the several barriers to new user orientation and to reduce the learning curve. I've been really excited about the response to the competition. I'm also pleased to announce four of the panelists who will judge the entries, namely Vint Falken, Keystone Bouchard, Eristica Strangelove, and Ordinal Malaprop. I'm so excited to have these shining lights of Second Life join in evaluating ...
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06.10.08Second Life Interface Design – 800,000L Contest ResourcesThanks to everyone who's expressed an interest in my Second Life user interface design contest. It's really exciting to know that a few people are engaged in thinking about solutions to the question of whether, as one part of a larger puzzle, a different approach to the SL client might help attract or retain users. Over the coming week or so, I'd like to try to aggregate previous posts on the topic of the SL UI. I have some bookmarks of my own, there's the SL road map, and there has been passionate discussion on other blogs. If you have ...
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