Streaming Music Controls & Track Information

Getting information about what media is playing on the current parcel has been on the todo list for a long time (and some of the first steps were done over the weekend), but getting the information is only half of the solution. the real task is what to do with it.

This development floater does not represent final UI and will not be in the viewer as seen.

Where would you find it useful to see the name of the audio stream for the current parcel, where for the name of the current tack, should it be displayed all the time music is playing? Echoed to chat as tracks change?

Something else ?

What options would you like to see? Are you a Listener or a DJ ?

What would you find useful, and (more importantly) why ?

Beta R9.0.13 OS X Released

While I was passed out the other night with a killer head cold, Kitty was busy and managed to resolve the issue that had been blocking our OS X builds!

So with that out the way we have released R9.0.13 as a beta for OSX to our beta testers. This is identical to the R9.0.13 that was released as the main Catznip viewer for Windows and Linux with the addition of some apple specific fixes.

We are flying blind past this point. Our in house Apple computer is from 2004 and can barely launch the viewer let alone allow us to test in any meaningful way.

Please report everything on the JIRA. 

With a little work this might be the first OS X build we can get into the release channel !

R9.0 Crash Breakdown

The good news; Catznip R9.0 is significantly more stable than R8.1 and we are seeing a drop in submitted reports in all areas. We're confident this will translate into a much higher position in the TPV viewer directory (expected mid June). Many thanks to the beta testers who helped make this possible!

The bad news is 'Unknown'... 

Driver crashes are a little beyond our control, the host OS, driver version, over-clocking (or over heating), or simply changing between rendering modes can account for these. The short version is that we are too small a team to be able to devote much time to chasing and fixing these, so unless we are seeing constant repeats of the same crash in the same driver on the same OS we're kind of sunk. Thankfully this seems to be very low in R9.0 so far.

OpenJPEG is also beyond our control and the crash rate is so low it wouldn't be a good use of our time to start trying to fix issues.

Crash : These relate to crashes in the viewer and with enough information , help and beta testing we stand a solid chance of fixing these. General rule of thumb, if you crash doing the same thing more than once, you need to report it to us on our JIRA.

The great Unknown is actually a collection of many faults that cause the viewer to simply stop running. The viewer peeks at it's log file from the previous run and if it unexpectedly ends it's counted here.

• Acts of nature : The power goes out while the viewer is running.
• Failed crash dump : There was a crash and the reporter didn't manage to complete.
• Task Manager : The viewer has locked up and the user kills it with Task manager.
• *p00f !* : Everything was ok then suddenly it all just vanished.

Right now we're interested in talking to anyone who routinely kills the viewer with task manager or who finds Catznip has a habit of suddenly ceasing to exist.

Catznip R9.0 Release !

This release has certainly been a long time coming and is our single biggest to date, it will also be the last mega update as we move to a new shorter faster release cycle.

The main new feature in R9.0 is the Chat which has been rebuilt from scratch. LL added CHUI, we spent a huge amount of time trying to make it nice only to find the performance with it enabled was unacceptable. As the old chat was removed at the same time we had no choice but to start over. Chat has been reimplemented from scratch and includes many CHUI inspired features.

Inventory searching has been made lightning fast, textures now have a preview tool-tip, script editor got a lot of love with a tighter UI, as you type highlighting for text searches, more work was done overhauling the UI and a new in place updater was added.

From Linden Lab this release adds CHUI (even though we don't expose it), facebook support, fitted mesh, materials, ribbon particles and request teleports amongst others things.

In answer to huge gap between R8 and this release we shelved a lot of things we were working on and started our open beta program. A huge thank you to everyone who got involved, reported bugs and issues, helped find bugs and crashes, made suggestions. This has been so successful that it will form the basis of all releases going forward.

Future releases will be smaller and incremental with more public testing. We hope this will allow up to keep up with Linden Lab, continue to deliver unique new features and make Catznip the most stable Second Life viewer. There is a small mountain of work we did that just isn't polished enough to get in this time, expect to see new things coming through thick and fast as we go forward.

Our priority now is to get a little break, test the hell out of this release and hopefully find a cure to our OS X woes.

Why are you still here ? R9.0 Wiki Page, Release Notes, Download.

Catznip R9.0 to Beta Testers

Catznip R9.0 has been released to beta testers, everyone in the release channel on R8.1 will be getting the update in a few hours time while we finish the release notes and user documentation on the website.

This marks the end of the Catznip R9.0 beta cycle. The Windows and Linux versions are done, OS X will follow and is our priority between now and starting the R9.1 beta cycle.

At the end of each cycle we are moving everyone over to the main channel and anyone wishing to continue in the following beta cycle will have to keep an eye on this blog and the 'Catznip Litterbox' group messages for the beta version.

As of now, all beta testers will be moved over to R9.0 on the release channel.

Those wishing to stay involved are encouraged to continue submitting reports on our JIRA and stay active in the  'Catznip Litterbox'. Download links for R9.1 beta will be published in due course.

A HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO GOT INVOLVED AND HELPED OUT - YOU ROCK!

Beta R9.0.13 Released

This is a sanity check release, assuming no show stoppers this build will become the R9.0 main release in a couple of days time and all R8 users will be asked to update.

Beta Testers : Please test thoroughly and report everything on the JIRA. All issues from this point are for the R9.1 beta cycle (more info to follow).


A huge thank you to everyone who got in touch here, on G+, Facebook, Twitter and in SL with location suggestions for the release snapshot. The response was amazing.

BETA TESTERS : If you can repeat a bug, it's not SL, it's a bug and we want to know about it.

• added : extra dictionaries for the spell checker (German, French, Italian and Polish)
• changed : cleaned up the auto-tooltips for settings driven 
• changed : 'Auto Replace' list renamed to avoid confusion
• changed : reworked the Troubleshooting preferences panel (added confirmation / restart messages to the reset user/personal settings)
• changed : 'Must be logged in' notice to sound alerts options + disabled the panel before logon
• fixed : [CRASH-9] Crash when trying to view a group session started by someone on your mute list
• fixed : Editor font selector in the Chat preferences panel isn't working correctly
• fixed : the 'IM_unblock_only_groups_friends' notification isn't shown when a non-friend IMs with 'VoiceCallsFriendsOnly' set to TRUE
• fixed : (re)added missing checkbox for the "offline IMs to email" setting
• fixed : added missing checkbox for the "restore unread IMs" setting
• fixed : "Request teleport" on the P2P chiclet context menu offers a teleport rather than requesting one