SecondLife Viewer 3 ~ Vs. "TPV's and Why I Cater To Them"

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Ok I get questioned from time to time, why is it that I seem to dislike SL V3 so much. And why I seemingly lavish praise on the Third Party Viewer's ?

    Well there is a very simple answer to that question.

    I dislike the poorly designed User Interface or the official LL V3. Let's face it, it is still the sophomoric piece of garbage UI we have had since the darn thing was introduced over a year and a half ago. Yeah, Yeah I know that V3 has the potential to kick some butt. But LL is not interested in the UI design. Nor should they be, The Lab's job is to get the underlying code base working properly and run as efficiently as possible on a very vast variety of hardware configuration's. Quite simply put, they don't have the time to be bothered with the frill's.

    Beside's that all TPV viewer's are based on LL code anyway's.

    It is in the Lab's best interest to attract new customer's, sell L$, and land. So that being said, it make's perfect sense to give a new potential customer a very basic, easy to navigate type of, hey I can down load this game jump right in, and start playing sort of a product upon initial introduction to the platform. Make's perfect sense to me. As a User becomes more familiar with SL, eventually they will move to the Advanced Mode available on the standard LL viewer.

    Ok so what is the next logical progression ? Well it could be Hitomi Tiponi's Starlight Skin Mod. In my opinion this is an obvious first choice, but it may not be so to everyone. StarLight makes no changes what so ever to the functionality of V3, the only change's is that the User Interface has a much more pleasant look and feel about it.

    Now here is where the Third Party Viewer's come into play, not only do they change the Skin, they also add extra functionality. The current state of affair's leave's us with only two really viable alternative choices.

    FireStorm and Kirsten's, and you also have Dolphin, that is to say if you are willing to adapt to V3 in the first place. If not you have Siana Gearz, of The Singularity Viewer, and Henri BeauChamp's Cool Viewer working on back porting everything they possibly can into V1.x

    I am purposely leaving out the Imprudence and Kokua viewer's for good reason, they are no longer interested in SL nor Viewer3, and are concentrating their effort's on Open Sim based Virtual World's. Good for them, Imprudence is hand's down the best viewer available at this particular point in time for OS and OSGrid.

    So why is it that I seemingly cater to the Third Party Viewer's ? It's simple, I like them better.

    So I am going to say this 1 more time.

Use The Viewer That Best Suit's Your Need's

JayR Cela :_)