Very proud to present  Catznip Script Recovery. Ever crash or get logged out while editing a script and then loose all your work?

Following a crash or forced disconnect you’re now presented with a dialog offering to recover the scripts you had open.

This works for all scripts, everywhere, and as we found out while trying to take the screenshot for this release, is very robust and persistent. It wont go away till you either recover or dismiss it .. even if you crash.

Ongoing, this pushes some more of of the work done with chat. There is now a right click context menu that allows you to switch between a single and re-sizable multi-line chat bar on the fly as well as making it easy to globally change the chat font size, the spell checker also got a lot of attention in perpetration for submission to the official client. There is a lot more to come in this area and feedback is greatly appreciated.

Group moderators get a bonus this release, you can now eject a user by opening the participants list and using the right click context menu. No more opening the group floater, waiting, searching for the user name, waiting, waiting. Just, click, click, bye bye jerkface.

RLVa got a well needed service with a number of FUI and location based bugs getting squished, Catznip SharedWear was also enabled by default. You no longer need to bother with folders naming attachment points for things you place in an #RLV folder, it just works. On related note, this release also includes the Lab’s fix for RenderResolutionDivisor, so things that make your vision fuzzy now function as they should.

Fans of a more classic interface and anyone with limited screen real estate will love the new Mini Location Bar and ability to remove the Buy L$ and Marketplace buttons. Just right click the top status bar.

Check out the full Release Notes for more and Download, don’t forget to join the inworld Group for support and report any bugs or feature requests on our Issue Tracker.

These things can take a couple of weeks so don’t go looking for us just yet though

I am also very pleased to announce that our public bug genie powered issue tracker is now open for Catznip viewer & RLVa bug reports and feature suggestions. While not required we do recommend you create an account as it will make life easier keeping track of any follow up as things progress.

Just to restate; We are very open to feature ideas or requests, but please present them in the form of a use case and not simply asking us to include feature X from viewer Y.

Oh .. and we should have Catznip R5 published very soon.

IMPORTANT ! R3 and R4 are functionally identical in all regards with the exception that R4 includes the first round of opengl fixes from Linden Lab. R3 is provided as a fall back for those who have problems. R4 should be noticeably faster.

The Group floater now has a drop down menu allowing you to quickly select your active title for the current group, including the option to have a group active with no title displayed.

Almost all floating panels can now be ‘rolled up’ to just show the title bar, nice quick way to clean up the window clutter. Simple, but very effective.

Last but not least, a couple of additions which come as a direct result of user feedback here and on the SLU forums.

You can now open the picks floater from the ‘Me’ menu and by right clicking on your avatar. Seems the Lab neglected to add an obvious way to open the picks floater and creating a pick via a landmark was convoluted at best (See WEB-4303). Thanks Inhandra.

After some debate a wear option for inventory folders has been added and you can now set yourself Away or Busy a bit quicker on the ‘Me’ menu. Thanks Isara.

Have a gander at the Release Notes while you Download.

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.)

After much hard work, tinkering and screaming fits we are very proud to offer up Catznip 3.2.0 Beta. This is a major release featuring all the new UI goodness from Linden Lab and the usual Catznip refinements you have come to expect. A lot of work has gone into improving framerates this release and we’re pretty confident this will be the fastest Second Life Viewer 3 to date.

The viewer 3 chat floater has been updated to add optional multi-line input support and can now be docked with the IM floater similar to Viewer 1.

Viewer 2 placed the IM & object notification chiclets to the bottom right of the screen and the Lab moved them back up to the top right with Viewer 3. Seems someone (looks at Kitty really hard) liked them so much in the bottom right that she just had to add the option to put them back down.

Snapshots to HD can now be saved to a specific location with custom filenames. Handy for professionals and habitual snappers alike.

Spell checker includes a couple of minor enhancements adding support for supplementary dictionaries. (If all goes well, this should eventually be the spell checker included with the official Linden Lab client. See Inara Pey’s blog; Viewer 3.x to get a speling cheker‘).

RLVa has been updated to work with the new UI and had a couple of bugs fixed.

There have been a handful of essential context menu enhancements; my favorite being right click a folder in your inventory and you can now open that folder in a new window, right click on someones name tag and you can teleport and copy their display-name.

Oh .. and we got rid of the huge BLOCK button on dialog menus, shessh, was way way to easy to just go around accidentally muting everyone who owned something that gave up a menu! (Don’t worry, you can still block by right clicking on the chiclet).

Check out the full release notes and downloads for both Windows and Linux.

I really have no clue so please if a few Linux peeps could poke it and then poke me with a yay or nay I would be very happy. Obviously if it works the pokes can be replaced with muffins. Blueberry ones.

Also, don’t forget to join the in world Catznip Viewer Group. It’s fun.

So, here is RC5 which adds two brand new bits relating to wearing items from your inventory, you can now CTRL+ENTER to add an attachment and for the technical minded there are a couple of debug settings to change what happens when you double click an attachment in your inventory.

Of the many bugs that were smushed, a couple of long standing Linden Lab ones were finally tracked down and beaten. Your inventory wont jump anymore when someone comes online and zooming in really close with your camera won’t clip (good job kitty cat).

I believe that some user interface tick box voodoo for the afore mentioned debug settings will happen sooner rather than later (won’t it kitty).

Kitty also wishes me to inform you that she is beavering away on a Viewer 3 but has declined to offer up any spoilers.

Find it here and the release notes..

To save you the very lengthy changelog, here are the highlights to read while it downloads. If you find any bugs ask in the Catznip Group or poke Catznip Catnap in world.

Catznip 2.8 (New ! and with Mesh !)

Suffice to say I could easily write pages and pages detailing all the new and unique features above and beyond all the shiny from Linden Lab; for now here is a simple list to get you started and expect to see some blog posts detailing exactly how the new stuff works very soon.

• Multiline Local Chatbar : Because sometimes a single line chat bar is just to small (Me / Preferences / Catznip / Chat panel)
• Spell Checker : Squiggly underlines everywhere. (Me / Preferences / Spell Check panel)
• Interaction History : A full history of everyone you have interacted with, see all the people you messaged and when. Never loose track of anyone ever again. (People sidebar / History tab)
• Many UNIQUE usability enhancements and minor additions to numerous to mention. 
• RLV API 2.7 : RLVa has been updated to support the latest API version.
• RLVa features shared wear, inventory features and many usability enhancements.

Catznip 2.6 Final (No Mesh. Old Shader Model)

Due to some very rare performance issues some people have with mesh enabled viewers, we are releasing a final maintenance version of 2.6. Aside from RLVa updates and the usual usability enhancements, it does not contain all of the new features from 2.8 above.

This is intended as a fall back should you have problems with version 2.8. There will be no further updates to Catznip 2.6