A few day's back I was rambling on about 32x ~vs~ 64x SecondLife compatible viewers, and got a bit side tracked with the Tear Off Menu capabilities that were first being introduced back in the Project SnowGlobe days.
It basically boils down to this, SL as a platform in a multi monitor set-up configuration for one reason or another does not or never has officially had a in built tear off menu function. I have no idea why, but the other day one of this blogs regular reader's : Lord posted in the comment sections about this exact issue being discussed years ago, LOL a lot of years ago, another great idea just swept under the proverbial invisible carpet by The Lab.
I have been involved with SL for 8 years now, and have watched all sort's of changes happen. Some of this stuff is really funny, I recall going to those meetings back with the SnowGlobe project lead Matthew Linden, and the ongoing server project headed up by Zero Linden, he is a genius and was the driving force behind the Rolling Restart's capability SL now enjoys, making the overall SL experience more enjoyable for everyone. Years ago LL would routinely shut the Entire Grid down once a week. So count your blessing's I guess / LOL :_)
At that point a new CEO Mark Kingdon had just taken the reigns, and was steering the over-all SL environment towards a real life advertising based platform, any long time Second Lifer knows the back story to that fiasco. As a result the SecondLife Viewer itself made a dramatic architectural change. The amount of bugs both during and ongoing can easily be explained any way you choose, I choose the word Painful.
One way or another Multi Screen Tear Off menu's was never officially built into the newer SnowStorm code base, and that was tied into the then current server side changes being worked out between then Zero Linden and IBM ~ prehaps ~ Sun Micro / Who knows ? I don't really remember now. It was however an interesting and turbulent time for SecondLife, and a lot of fun too. I managed to dig up 2 old photo's from Zero Linden's meeting place. Just thought I would share these with ya. I believe these are from sometime in late 2007, give or take a bit :_)
That point is totally irrelevant now. The V3.x viewer architecture and the seemingly dwindling current TPV variants are all very stable. So why don't we have Tear Off Screen Menu's ?
I'm going to repost Lord's comment and the link that he gave describing this much needed feature to the SL viewer.
Hi JayR ! Your idea of the Tear Off Menus was actually implemented a long time ago by a viewer called MonoVida Studio / MonoVida Communicator...and was proposed for adoption by Dzonatos Sol (aka Jonathan Ballard )to LL in the Jira entry SNOW-375. Somehow, when Snowglobe 2.0 was ditched for the new moniker Snowstorm 2.0, they lost this project as well. According to Jonathan Ballard it wouldn't be all that hard to implement it, but that due to upcoming changes in internet protocols he suggests waiting till they have been implemented to develop such a viewer. If you would like to read more about it, try here: http://icyspherical.blogspot.com/2010/07/overview-snow-375-is-api-to-snowglobe.html
Ya really gotta read this.
JayR Cela :_)
P.S. @Lord / thanks :_)
