Intentions, Design and Features
Catznip as a project is not intended as a clearing house for other TPV patches, it’s about taking a fresh look at things and doing them better.
There is zero point in turning out a viewer that’s more or less the same as Firestorm / etc. (a fair selection of Kitty’s work ends up included in FS anyway). Literally, the only patch that has come from a 3rd party in Catznip is Qarl’s prim alignment tool.
We’re doing this because we are passionate about Second Life, passionate about usability and have the skills to shape things our own way. More importantly, we also enjoy doing this kind of thing, you know, for fun.
A lot of Catznip’s features are subtle and easily missed. For example, did you know you can right click and offer someone a TP from just about everywhere, right clicking on a landmark in a notecard and you can go right there (rather than click, copy to inventory, open inventory, find, open, press teleport).
There are dozens and dozens of tiny, often unique, sexy usability features like this with very practical roots. In this case; we do a lot of shopping as a group.
We’re really happy to very seriously look at feature ideas, but they have to be in the context of a clearly defined need, ‘why’ rather than ‘because’.
(Based on a SLU forum response to feature ideas and wishes for Catznip.)
I’m still waiting for someone to make the Song/Artist ID come up in a separate floater with it being a clickable hot link to a web music store (hopefully opened to the page containing the words in the link). Yes, I realize that LL Wiki will need to make a page showing the preferred naming convention for it to work with any accuracy, but it does seem doable and quite possibly capable of providing a small revenue stream for the viewer maker for the click throughs.
We have zero plans to monetize the viewer.
Love it so far! One minor feature that I would love to see is the ability to use “:” in place of “/me ” for emotes, and autoclose of OOC – minor features that greatly improve usability
Switching to a viewer that doesn’t have it is now hard!
Yeah .. They are on the todo list.
I’m using 3.2.0 Beta on Linux (Ubuntu 11.04). It looks nice and slick, and also seems to be quite stable.
However, I noticed a few usability issues that make the interface a little awkward. Some of them (esp. fonts) might be Linux-specific, don’t know how it looks on Windows.
1) It is not possible to wear (the content of) folders (only options are replace/add to outfit). I think it’s pretty reasonable to have for each clothing item a folder with prims, layers, alpha mask, and then just click on the folder and choose wear (works with phoenix, btw.)
2) In the same vein, several frequently used actions are second-level items and/or require a second mouseclick: set status to busy, zoom in on someone who IMed me (cause guys always IM from the other end of the place), open the sound settings (I may want louder music, but not louder button sonds…).
3) Keybord shortcuts don’t work at all in mouse look (where they are needed), but they do work out of mouselook.
4) The viewer ignores my desktop settings for fonts and uses a much too tiny one for the menus (I have 1680×1050 on a 15.6″ laptop). I can switch to a larger font for chat, but for all else the only option seems to resize the UI, which makes every UI element bigger and wastes quite some screen real estate.
5) It seems impossible to completely disable the chat toasts. They are pretty distracting if they pop up under the (partly) transparent conversation floater.
6) One can dock local chat to conversations, but the height of the text area differs, and thus either local or IM shows a line that is cut in half
7) Italics for emotes is a bad idea IMHO. It’s simply harder to read. It would be lovely if there were a way to switch that off.
I’m running on Ubuntu 11.10 (I don’t use win), I have no font problems at all. Post a screen cap to imgur and drop me a link in world maybe?
Viewer 2 Mouselook is NOT the same as Viewer 1, there are a lot of bits that just don’t work the same (LL code, not catznip), we do plan working on it sometime, but it’s not a priority right now.
We are not going to rejig the menus just because we can, that said .. a pop out menu for 2 items is for want of a better word, silly. so in this case, we will
Right click on a folder and ‘wear’ (selectively replace items on your existing outfit) is not in, however in catznip you can shift/ctrl-select multiple items in a folder and pick wear.
To zoom in on someone, right click on their name in the people floater or the tag over their head .. It’s not really intended to stuff your camera up someones nose from half a region away. We might be able to refine a little, again it’s not really a high priority.
There is no way to remove the chat toasts, although .. if you enable bubble chat …
Mini map title bar was added back with FUI, not so sure I’m a fan of it either.
The main thrust here seems to be Catznip doesn’t work like phoenix (or to a lesser extent, firestorm). The point of this post was actually to point out it wont, and that’s on purpose. We don’t much care for viewer 1 to be blunt.
No, I don’t care whether it works like phoenix or viewer 1. It’s just that I do have some usability issues, and you wrote that usability is on the Catznip agenda. So I pointed them out. It’s still a fine viewer, and I like it
I think the ‘main thrust’ is more an issue of different ‘use cases’, or different ‘practical roots’. And of course I understand that your ‘use case’ has priority for you.
E.g. I don’t spend a lot of time shopping, but I often go to clubs, and I frequently get IMs from random people lurking in some corner.. so I really like to be able to *find* them. Which is why it would be lovely to have ‘zoom in’ on the right-click menu when I click on their name in the IM post.
Also, I often change clothes on the fly. I know that I can select multiple items from a folder, but that’s precisely the additional step that makes it tedious to change when in a hurry.
Concerning the fonts, Catznip defaults to a sans regular 8pt font for me. Maybe it’s just that my Ubuntu installation lacks some font set, I don’t know. But it’s not easy to read characters that are about 1mm high…
I get your point completely, used to get dressed and change clothing the exact same way .. right click this folder right click that one .. trade these shoes for those and so on ..
The problem (and why we didn’t dive in and add this on day one) is wear can be counter productive when a folder can contain multiple variations of an item or attachment and you end up picking individual items anyway.
Why not give outfits a try, you can predefine a number of personal presets and switch them very quickly. I try and make a new outfit every couple of days and either update an old one or save it fresh, my quick wardrobe is now pushing 40 distinct looks with everything mix and match put together by hand, I haven’t needed to ‘wear’ a folder in a long time and I spend a lot less time overall digging in my inventory.
All that said, I have spoken to kitty about this..
The font problem .. try
sudo apt-get install ttf-dejavu