Catznip dead ? Far from it !

Small update. We're making quiet progress on a Catznip R10 release that will bring Catznip on Windows and Linux bang up-to date.

Invite only alpha testing will start soon.

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.

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

Beta R9.0.12 Released

R9.0.12 Is (hopefully) the last update before we switch the main release over with R9.0.13

This update fixes a number of crashes and polishes up some the last little bits before we go live. From this point crashes and show stoppers ONLY. All other issues are now bumped to R9.1, please continue to report but don't expect fixes to be in this release.

A lot of work has been done in making inventory searching faster, please take some time to test this and make sure there are no problems.

This update tests the new in place updater. This should work for both Windows and Linux users. Feedback Please !

• fixed : [CATZ-131] IM Tab Orientation selector should say "Restart required"
• fixed : [CATZ-120] URL textbox doesn't use full width of search floater
• fixed : [CATZ-106] Preference button in media hover opens wrong tab
• fixed : [CATZ-136] Main menu isn't localized when the language is set to German
• fixed : [CRASH-7] Crash in LLOutfitsView::setSelectedOutfitByUUID() when logging on with a newly created account
• fixed : [CRASH-8] Opening the build floater on the land tool crashes the viewer
• fixed : [CATZ-145] Inventory focus changes tabs when new inventory accepted, additionally creating a new notecard in the "Recent" tab would switch make "All Items" the active tab
• fixed : [CATZ-141] Some notification toasts aren't showing and are only available under the notification well
• added : [CATZ-137] Slider for the camera/move floater transparency
• added : toolbar buttons for group conversations, "View Information", "Show Chat History" and "View Notices"
• changed : only fetch the feature/GPU table if the file has actually changed
• fixed : recipient's name is shown on the teleport offer popup when offering a teleport from the nearby people panel while @shownames restricted
• fixed : viewer slowdown/freezing while searching and/or fetching inventory
• fixed : secondary inventory floaters move position when creating a new inventory item
• fixed : inventory items jump/flicker/radically change scroll position when creating a new inventory item
• fixed : don't send typing start packets to groups or conferences
• added : New icon for payments
• added : RLVa German menu translations (Thanks Qetesh)
• added : New offer TP icon (Thanks Winter Ventura)
• changed : Updated 20px default person & group icons
• changed : RLVa debug is now develop. Much sexier.
• changed : Removed redundant ugly image from redundant media browser floater.
• changed : Removed some redundant viewer 1 artwork

Beta R9.0.11 Released

R9.0.11 brings us very very close to being able to declare this round done, beyond any last minute blockers we anticipate that Beta R9.0.13 will become the new Catznip R9.0 public release.

This update vastly improves the updater on both Windows and Linux providing feedback while the update is being downloaded. Beta R9.0.12 is intended to test this and will be pushed in a few days time.

A lot of issues fixed in the release have been reported on our JIRA, it has been really awesome to see the attention to detail and perseverance shown by our testers.

If you haven't already please make an account on the JIRA and report everything, please  do not assume that any problems or weirdness are just 'SL being SL'. REPORT ALL BUGS.

• fixed : [CRASH-5] Selecting Share from Profile Results in Crash
• fixed : [CATZ-59] Search/Replace floater has unintuitive tab order
• fixed : copy/pasting text with an ending line-break  into a text editor control doesn't insert a line break segment
• changed : use the current selection as the search phrase when opening the inplace editor using Ctrl-F
• changed : [CATZ-116] Add usernames to avatar picker's Friends tab
• added : filter editor to the "resider chooser" floater's friends tab
• fixed : [CATZ-117] The "more information" link appears over the land impact information area, the "Stretch both sides" checkbox has no text in every language except English, the "Grid Options" arrow button shouldn't have a label overlapping the arrow icon.
• fixed : [CATZ-106] Preference button in media hover opens wrong tab
• added : gear menu for group conversations also shown when right-clicking the IM tab
• fixed : [CATZ-109] The beta viewer doesn't show the full version number in Help / About
• fixed : [CRASH-6] Stack overflow/infinite recursion after call to LLChannelManager::onStartUpToastClose()
• fixed : [CATZ-112] Sunrise/Midday/Sunday/Midnight can still be checked after switching to region windlight settings
• fixed : [CATZ-122] First instance of Conversations floater has inactive opacity setting
• fixed : [CATZ-121] Long display name overlaps the user name on the avatar inspector
• fixed : [CATZ-127] Taking an object no longer highlights it in inventory
• fixed : [CATZ-104] Help / Report Bug Points to invalid URL
• fixed : sorting a group participant list by "Recent Speakers" sorts all participants by name
• fixed : [CATZ-108] Misaligned text in Profile Picks tab
• fixed : Translations for me menu avatar status was missing.
• changed : Updated German menu translations (Thanks Qetesh)

• added : "Check for Updates" menu item to the main Help menu to trigger a manual update check with user feedback
• added : floater to track the progress of the updater download, modal when it's a required download and the user is still at the start screen. floater is shown at start-up when the updater resumes the background download
• changed : only cap the updater download bandwidth once the user has passed the login screen
• fixed : crash when resuming a download on start-up due to freed memory

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.

Beta R9.0.10 Released

Wow !! This has been a manic few days since we release R9.0.9 with whole mess of things being reported on our JIRA.

A huge huge thank you to everyone who submitted issues, helped us track down problems or tried out the beta and gave feedback. Kitty deserves many scritches having spent her entire weekend fixing most issues as fast as they were reported!

Catznip R9.0.9 > R9.0.10 Beta Changelog

• fixed : [CRASH-4] Crash when picking 'Close All' from the IM well context menu after 'upgrading' a P2P conversation to a conference
• fixed : [CRASH-3] Crash when changing the sort order of the legacy participant list after closing a group/conference conversation
• fixed : viewer stalls when a lot of calling cards are present in inventory
• added : "<Online friends> / <Total friends>" to the online friends accordion tab title
• fixed : "Missing String in strings.xml: [ÿ]" appears in the log when opening the gestures floater
• changed : 'ChicletBarAlignment' can be toggled at runtime and no longer requires a restart
• fixed : [CATZ-96] duplicate 'Conversations..' menu item in the 'Communicate' menu
• fixed : some of the panel_preferences_chat_translation.xml language files have the wrong closing tag
• fixed : [CATZ-97] 'View Notices' menu item is active for group 'none'
• fixed : [CATZ-98] 'Show blocked Residents/Objects' button on the nearby and friends people panel does nothing
• fixed : [CATZ-95] Missing checkmark in 'Show permissions' options on the friends panel gear menu
• fixed : word highlights from the inplace search return when extra text is added to the text editor
• fixed : [CATZ-58] "Typing" is visible in the nametag when bubble chat is enabled for as long as the chat is visible
• fixed : [CATZ-88] Unable to filter "My Objects" by 'name' or 'description'
• fixed : [CATZ-99] Export Auto-Replace list wants to Import instead
• added : [CATZ-102] Ability to scroll the conversations floater tabs with the mouse wheel
• fixed : [CATZ-100] Unable to delete contents of an object by using Delete key
• fixed : [CATZ-89] drop down overlaps checkboxes in the Chat IM preferences panel
• internal : updated thanks section

We're totally overwhelmed at how well things are going and how thorough some people are testing the beta. If you want to get involved. Check out our open beta program.