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 ?

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.

Updated Avatar Picker & Updater

Following a request on our JIRA to add names to the friends tab of the avatar picker (used for group & friend invites and sharing inventory) [CATZ-116], the following will be part of Beta R9.0.11 and in addition to the second column makes the list searchable and shows on-line friends listed in bold. Much better for people with a LOT of friends.

The built in updater also got some more work, shows progress of the download and resumes should the client be restarted part way though. There is also menu item to manually check for an update. We don't want to do another update to the beta without this in place to avoid future confusion. Really looking forward to this being live.

I want to talk to Linux users and get some feedback ion how they run the viewer and what they would expect an updater to do in practice.

A huge thank you to everyone who has gotten in touch and especially those who have helped out on the JIRA and submitted translations.

Updater Feedback & Translations

There was a minor snafu this morning with the update from Beta R9.0.9 to R9.0.10 that was quickly fixed but it really raised the issue of updater not providing any feedback about what was going on.

Hopefully this will help to resolve some of the points raised by our beta testers, it's not complete and there is a very large question about what Linux users would prefer, but for now ..

There has also been some work done on integrating a lot of updated German translations provided by Qetesh (these include German RLVa menus!), lots more to go and hopeful we can find people to cover the other languages.