New SL Viewer 3 User Interface: Not Glorious Yet!

Inara Pey of Modem World and Daniel Voyager have a first look at the new SL Viewer 3 user interface, which was added as a user-accessible Beta candidate on the 18th, and which Linden CEO Rod Humble promises to be "glorious". Gone is the much-hated, behemoth right sidebar; instead there are elegant icon buttons on the bottom and the left, with notifications on the top right. Definitely a big improvement over Viewer 2, though it still doesn't look mass market friendly enough to me. For one I think the UI icons could be much larger and more colorful. Overall I'm still waiting to see a big, paradigm-shifting change worthy of the word "paradigm". (Or for that matter, glorious.) Hopefully we see more iterations before this becomes the official viewer. Meantime, read more about it here.

Comments

[David]

It's beta, of course it's not glorious yet.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Sitting on my hands and waiting...but Hamlet, once you've seen Glitch, whose UI seems just out of Beta, you see how high the bar is for LL.

Or maybe I'm already used to a talking "pet rock" that shows me how to find my way around and level up, without annoying me.

LL cannot have pet rocks and other silly but lovable features of Glitch...but.

LL takes itself very seriously, and SLers too often take themselves too seriously, unlike the Tiny Speck people who made Glitch. I just hope that Rod Humble British wit brings back some of the whimsy to SL...it's missing right now and I'm rooting for them!

[Evie Miles]

This new Beta is the first thing I've seen that would even remotely convince me to switch to a new viewer from my clunky old 1.32 code Phoenix.

Although I'm going to courteously disagree with the suggestion that the buttons be larger and more colourful. I think they're on the right track keeping the UI neutral and discreet. Leaving as much real-estate on the screen as possible to view the world itself just makes me so happy. :P

Oh well. Onwards and upwards, at least it's not a gigantic WTF moment, right out of the box! :)

[Isadora Fiddlesticks]

this looks truly promising!! kudos to the staff who are hard at work doing this, hope this gets integrated to official viewer really soon.

[Kate Miranda]

I'm not going to switch from Phoenix (which works for me) for something that people keep giving me various horror story reports on until I see any reason to do so. Mesh? Sheesh...do we need it? Is anyone working on it at Linden Lab anymore?

I'm not getting the Glitch comparisons here. It's a fun little game but very 2 dimensional. It's not much evolved over the look of IMVU. Cute, though. But far from the sophisticated build and scripting capacities of SL.

[Myf McMahon]

"Your world, your imagination."

Computer games (insert ranting and raving over SL being/not being a game here) assert personality, mood and style through every element of their presentation. From the gameplay itself, to the advertising images, the design of models, the music used and just as importantly, through the GUI.

One of the philosophical underpinings of SL is, as expressed by the quote I started with, that it is the end users who determine what it is and how it's used. To better serve this end, the GUI needs to be as neutral as possible, it should not assert style or flavour, otherwise it risks undermining the style and flavour an individual user wants to bring to their corner of the grid. Making the buttons "larger and more colourful," or importing some of the "whimsy" from Glitch would be a very quick way to impose a particular feel to SL and as such, are both pretty bad ideas.

Ideally, what they should be doing now, is keeping the in-built interface as is, but give the skinners more control over how those elements look. At the moment, we can change colours and not much else. If the end user were given better and finer control over scaling, the ability to apply custom buttons and whatnot to GUI elements, the ability to use custom font choices, etc. Then you can have a colourful SL, Ignatius can have his Glitchesque whimsy, vampire rpers can have something suitably gothic and none of you are enforcing your prefered SL on anyone else.

[Henri Beauchamp]

@Myf

Alas, the original SL motto "Your world, your imagination." has been long dropped and forgotten by Linden Lab...

If only they could reinstate it (and act accordingly), I'd applauds enthusiastically.

This said, a (somewhat) customizable UI is a step in the right direction, even if only a small step in the current state of affairs, given how crippled, dysfunctional, unpractical, cumbersome and slow the v2/3 UI is when compared to v1's...

[Myf McMahon]

What I'd also like to see is some plugin/addon utility rolled into the viewer. Subsuming some of the roles people currently use HUDs for. It would be nice if, instead of needing a HUD or 3rd party viewer to add a radar, I could have the functionality as an addon to the GUI itself. It could pull some of "script weight" from things like AOs and radars out of the world and stick them in the client's end.

@Henri: I think Humble's Lab is trying to get back to those roots. Certainly the changes we've seen since he took over are less about the corporatisation/social networking push that was going on under Kingdon, more about focusing on having fun. There is definitely less emphasis on building the world for yourself, they're clearly pitching more at consumers than creators. Even still, the point that it's almost entirely user generated content is a big part of the image they're pushing.

[Graphic Dix]

Very nice look, pratical, consistent with the old version etc, well...i'm using it only since a day but i can definitely say that like it.
Only thing i cant understand is the avatar picker menu (???) also if the possibility do costumize the toolbar is something i always dreamed.

[Ezra]

I prefer neutral UI colors and subdued icons, of course not to the point of obscurity though. I wouldn't mind customizeable colors and icon sets ontop of what's default, but I think its important that by default the UI doesn't have too much of a tone because each region's intended tone can differ greatly.

Linden Lab seems to be taking their aesthetic choices for the viewer from web browsers and that's appropriate. I wouldn't want a UI that distracts from the vibe of what sim builders had in mind anymore than I'd want a Chrome with bigger, flashier, colorful icons that distracts from the personality of different websites.

[foneco zuzu]

At least some that posted, know and use to be in world, others are really playing silly games instead (Glitch, wtf???)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I would like full design access to the UI, with sufficient flexibility to bring HUD elements on board.

As a bare minimum, end user should be able to configure hotbars to his or her taste and move/dock those elements at will. The current tear-off system in v2 is counterintuitive and prone to user error.