Programmer Wunderkind Katharine Berry Joins Second Life Proper (And She's Already Built a Giant Prim Search Engine)!

Three years ago, a fifteen year old British girl created AjaxLife, Second Life's first web-based interface, mainly out of "boredom, wanting to talk to people". Known as Katharine Berry, her age confined her to Teen Second Life, but she continued innovating nonetheless, creating a version of the SL viewer with dynamic shadows a couple years ago, scaling AjaxLife to work with the iPhone, and so on. Still, it's been frustrating to see someone so talented restricted to the cramped playpen of Teen SL. But late last month, Miss Berry finally turned 18, and after showing some ID, graduated from the "teen grid", and made her way into Second Life proper.

When I finally caught up with her in-world, she was already on the SL property she'd acquired, busy with putting giant objects into Second Life.

"Playing with huge numbers of megaprims," as she put it. As it turns out, she's created a search engine for finding the giant building blocks, which many SL content creators cherish for their creative possibilities, but have a gray area status among the Lindens.

At any rate, behold Megaprim.SL, Katharine Berry's megaprim search engine. How's it work?

"Search for something, pick a result, and it sends you a copy," she explains to me. "If you haven't used it before it asks you to prove who you are by sending you an IM first, to prevent spam. Clicking that link should deliver you a prim."

So within weeks of joining SL, she's already created an innovation that will be a great boon to content creators (though probably cause some Linden headaches too.) As for Second Life itself, as a world, Katharine Berry doesn't seem entirely sold:

"It's very obvious why 90% - 99.9% of people leave," she tells me. "[Y]ou don't know anybody and have no idea what to do, making it all rather dull."

And having said that, Katharine goes back to what actually interests her, which seems to be making things that make Second Life more usable for others -- which in this case, involves wondering "if anyone is ever going to actually want a 28.352x28.352x0.142 prim," as she puts it. "But it's there if you want it."

Comments

[Princess Ivory]

Isn't this similar to what the SALT HUD already does? I use that all the time to get megaprims of various sizes delivered to me.

[Keystone Bouchard]

Megaprim.SL.. brilliant! Happy Birthday, Katharine, and keep up the great work!

[Loki]

shes right it can be dull.

[Latif Khalifa]

Hardly an innovation as the article claims, http://prims.streamgrid.net/ has been there from 2008.

[Angela Talamasca]

Glad she's finally able to join us. However, her megaprim search is hardly an innovation. There are quite a few free ones floating around the grid, as others have already noted. Imo, her innovations are her ajax & iphone clients. Just sayin...

Anyway, welcome aboard, Ms. Berry!

[Hamlet Au]

prims.streamgrid.net looks cool but Katharine's variation still seems to have some additional features that make it innovative.

[Fogwoman Gray]

Gah! Another child prodigy making me feel like a complete loser :)
Welcome aboard, Miss Berry! I look forward to seeing what captures your interest here.

[brinda allen]

Ms Berry has it right...
Nooblets come...no one to chat with 'cept another nooblet...
Default avies totaly suck...
Too embarassed to continue on...they leave...
Lindens don't seem to be able to fix/don't want to fix the golden first hour.
The SL mentors that did actually *work* with new ppl during that first hour are now disbanded...(All maybe 100 of them...the remaining 1600 never seemed to find the time to go to the HIs

What's that line? "There will always be a Mainland"

Or the Fuller Brushmans shtick...
"Knock on enuff doors and "X" open..."Y" buy a brush..."

Get enuff nooblets and some will stay...the hell with the ones that don't.

[Graham Mills]

SL can use all the skilled programmers it can get -- kudos to Katharine and I hope she has a great time on the Main Grid.

[Opensource Obscure]

Hamlet, a tip: avoid in the first place to claim "first-ness" or to boost a service/tool over another - when a technical comparison shows there are no huge differences between them. That only makes picky people (like me :) to get in the debate to say things that aren't really important - like that "additional features" you mention aren't actually innovative.
But that was not the point of this post, I guess - the point was that we now have one more great programmer willing to contribute to Second Life's ecosystem.

And another great news here, is that now we have not one, but TWO well-working systems to find megaprims. Awesome! Did you ever try to find BY HAND the megaprim that fits your building? A total PITA.

Thanks Katharine & Latif!
note the alphabetical order :D

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Speaking as a lazy and unproductive programmer... it's good to have somebody around who actually, you know, FINISHES projects :)

I wish we could get clarity on megaprims. They are so undeniably useful for building in low-prim situations... but they are just as undeniably useful for griefing. I think we need hard boundries on plots. If it doesn't fit completely on your land, you can't rez it. That's not just a control on misuse of megaprims, that would also keep (for example), your neighbor's trees from swaying through the wall into your bedroom on a 512 plot.

[soror nishi]

welcome...:))