Catznip R7 is in progress, we’ve been a bit bogged down with RL recently but things are picking back up now, going to take our time with this one and build on the success and stability of R6. A huge thank you to everyone who has gotten in touch, contributed bug reports, feature ideas and  recommended the viewer to friends.

Our in-world HQ is almost finished, for any intrepid explorers who want a sneak peek, find a stargate and ‘/d catznip’.

Viewer 1 TPVs (Phoenix & Singularity) have SharedWear disabled by default as does Exodus which is using an older RLVa. Imprudence is too old to be affected.

What is SharedWear?

As part of the RLV specification, you have always been able to expose a specific folder in your inventory to scripts, the primary purpose of the #RLV folder is to allow scripts to attach objects to your avatar without requiring you to manually locate and wear the item yourself.

Historically, the #RLV folder has suffered a technical limitation. The viewer simply did not know where objects were to be attached. As a work around you have always been required to place objects in attachment point named sub folders.

For a long time RLVa would attempt to make this process easy for you by making the folders automatically the first time you wore an item. A work around the work around so to speak.

SharedWear is an RLVa feature that corrects the original problem. You simply no longer need attachment point named folders cluttering up your #RLV folder or item names. Any existing attachment point references will still be honored so nothing breaks.

RLVa doesn’t automatically make attachment point folder with SharedWear as they are no longer required.

If wish to enable this feature in Phoenix & Singularity or have problems and wish to revert the original RLVa behaviour, check or uncheck the top menu  ’RLVa > Debug > Enable Shared Wear’.

Any issues relating this feature should be posted on our Issue Tracker. Download Catznip R6 to try out SharedWear!

The viewer directory is refreshed weekly so while we can’t guarantee to stay at the top, remaining one of the most stable SL viewers is something we take personally. Crashes suck. Anyway, we’re dancing about on cloud 9 right now. If you haven’t already update to R6!

Direct delivery adds an inbox for all purchases from the Second Life Marketplace and should significantly improve your shopping fun. We are playing with some ideas to make it even better for Catznip users and would really welcome your input once it’s live.

Just to add, we now have a Twitter and Facebook presence, follow, like and stuff!

Just want to give a huge thank you to our users, helpers and supporters for the encouragement and feedback. A special mention for our long suffering and often neglected friends during the many hours we’ve spent on this project, if it wasn’t for your constant and ongoing interruptions and distractions we would probably have been finished murdered each other a long time back.

It’s a labour of love, but we couldn’t do it without you.

She is Kitty Barnett, I’m Trinity Dejavu and this is our Catznip!

That all said a brand new floater to send group messages appeared out of nowhere, just right click on a group in ‘My Groups’ and away you go. Incoming group messages got some love and are now just a bit more readable and they sort correctly, oh, and we jammed in a ton of windlight presets from a variety of sources (sorted and cleaned them up too).

Of the numerous bugs ironed out in this release, the delay when you right click something, or when you want to edit has been blasted to tiny pieces, as has the rather nasty one involving our spell-checker and multi-line chat (sorry about that). Thanks to everyone who contributed on the Issue Tracker and passed on feedback.

Check out the full Release Notes for more and Download, as usual join the inworld Group for support and report any bugs or feature requests on our Issue Tracker.

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, 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.)