Catznip R12 Release Notes

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Inventory – Accept in

R12InvAcceptIn.png

This is definitely one of the most important features of this releases and one that (I hope) will have the most impact on how you deal with shopping in Second Life and keeping your inventory manageable.

I’ve written about this before (see http://blog.catznip.com/2017/03/catznip-r12-three-days-of-teasers-day-1.html) so I won’t go into minute detail but essentially this feature attempts to keep your inventory more manageable and organized by letting you decide where a folder should go at the time you receive it.

Imagine going to a shopping event; some of the things you’ll want to buy on the spot, while others you’ll want to grab a demo of. Maybe you try it on the spot, or maybe you’ll accumulate all the demos and then teleport home to try things on at your own leisure. Most likely you’ll end up with a bunch of new top level folders cluttering up your inventory and some new things in your Objects folder. And if you sort that then and there anything you bought will end up hopelessly lost.

With this feature, you’ll now get a new drop-down when you get offered a folder (or on the buy floater as well) letting you decide where something should be saved to so for me personally, anything I buy I put into my “Shopping Bag” folder, and any demos I want to try I divert to my “Demos Only” folder.

Clicking the browse of the wrench icon will let you simply pick a folder, or provide you with more advanced configuration options:

R12InvAcceptInFlow.png

This means that if – for instance – I go to this month’s Uber event and buy something it’ll be auto-sorted to a special “Shopping / 2017-December / Uber” folder and even if I don’t unpack or touch a single box I’ll still have some semblance of a sorted inventory.

(You can get to the “Accept in” configuration floater from the Inventory / Gear menu and “Configure Accept In”)

Inventory – Accept in (Object folder)

As useful as the above is, it soon became apparent that boxed up items or demos still presented a problem: I like to demo things at my own house but if the demo is boxed up that means that the demo object is in the events folder (since I acquired it there), but the unboxed folder will be in a folder for my home region since that’s where I unpacked it.

Clearly there needed to be some way to keep the contents of an unpacked object near to where that object itself lives in your inventory and this new feature was born: for the most part (and if I did everything correctly) you shouldn’t even notice this too much and things will just work as you’d expected them to.

For instance:

R12invAcceptInObject.png

If the accept in destination is prefixed with the word “Object:” it simply means that I’m trying to be clever and offering to let you unpack an object into the same folder the item lives in rather than some completely unrelated folder elsewhere in your inventory.

Since there are as many inventory organizing schemes as there are residents, this might >not< be the behaviour you want in which case you can click the little wrench icon and untick the following:

R12invAcceptInObjectCfg.png

Inventory – Searching

R12InvFilter.png

The next big inventory feature is the completely revamped inventory filter floater which comes in both an expanded (tall) version on the left, or the more compact (tabbed) version on the right. Simply click the arrows in the bottom right to switch between one and the other.

The biggest change here – and one that I end up using all the time now – is searching your inventory for a keyword. You’ll notice that at the top it says “Exact”, “All” and “Any”:

  • Exact – search your inventory as you always have; an item needs to contain exactly what you type in order to show in the filtered list
  • All (new) – splits what you type in words; in order to be visible an item needs to contain all of the words that you typed but not necessarily in that order
  • Any (new) – again we’re searching by words but any item that contains at least one of the words you type will be show in the filter

Examples:

  • I remembered picking up some Wasabi Pills hair 2-3 months ago and picking the Ombre pack so combining “ombre” >and< “Wasabi” (so an “All” search) instantly gave me what I needed

R12InvFilterAll.png

  • I needed to find a gacha kitty headband I got months ago. Good luck! So I searched my inventory for all occurrences of “band”, “head” >or< “hair” (so an “Any” search) and after a lot of scrolling I got it

R12InvFilterAny.png

Play around with these a little bit and you’ll see that they’re extremely useful tools to let you find that specific item you’re looking for that would have otherwise been much harder to locate. Once you’re familiar with the “Exact”, “All” and “Any” concept pay attention to the shorthand code that’s appearing in the main inventory floater as well. You don’t need to actually specify a search type on the filter floater, you can simply prefix your regular search words with “any:” and “all:” as well.

Finally, since it was a special request it’s also possible to search your inventory using regular expressions (don’t worry if you don’t know what this means!):

R12InvFilterRgx.png

Inventory – Mark user-created folders as protected/system folders

If you right-click one of your own folders you’ll have a new option to treat it as if It was a system folder: this means that it sorts at the top with the other system folders if you have “Sort System Folders to Top” checked and it will also prevent you from accidentally deleting it.

This doesn’t actually mess with your inventory but is rather a local setting; if you use multiple computers then you’ll have to do it for each once (I’m working on that!), and it won’t apply to any other viewers.

R12InvSystemFolder.png

Inventory – Minor re-arranging of the folder context menu

As you might be able to spot from the screenshot above I did some minor layout changes to the inventory context menu; with the new inventory options and LL’s new “Use as default” it felt like the menu was getting rather bloated; so in order to keep it manageable I decided to fold all inventory creation options into the “New Items” sub menu.

If you have any thoughts to share (good or bad) please do use the feedback option in the viewer; for things like this the only way I know whether a change worked out for the best or not is if you all tell me 😊.

Inventory – Take (Replace Links)

Firestorm added a convenient “Replace Links” feature which was then contributed back to Linden Lab and is present in R12 as well (you can read more about this on LL’s blog or Inara’s blog posts).

As an extra convenience I added a “Take (Replace Links)” option to the context menu of a rezzed object which will take the item into inventory and pre-fill the replace links floater.

(Note that the option will only show if the rezzed object has links pointing to it in your inventory)

R12TakeReplace.png

Quick preferences – Main

Catznip’s version of “quick preferences” was added in R11; R12 adds some minor functionality and enables the mysterious “quick inventory” tab.

R12QuickPrefs.png R12QuickPrefsWearing.png

Minor improvements:

  • [CATZ-278] - The 'Quick Preferences' floater should be collapsible
  • [CATZ-293] - Add "Quick Preferences" to the main (Me) menu

The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-P (the conflicting shortcut of 'Print Selected Object Info' was changed to Alt-Shift-P)

  • Remember and restore the last active quick preferences tab
  • Added a button for avatar rendering exceptions to the "Quick Preferences" floater
  • Added a sorting menu to the wearing quick preferences tab

Bug fixes:

  • [CATZ-295] - 'Render Attached Lights' check box on the quick preferences panel doesn't turn off lights immediately

Quick preferences – Quick inventory

We all keep several HUDs attached in order to get to them quickly if we need to (i.e. mesh body/head HUD, or a hugger/dance/posing HUD) or worse, things we only need ever so often and if you’re like me, you’ll hate hunting them down in inventory because it feels clumsy and interrupt getting dressed.

The quick inventory panel is my first attempt at a way to define things you want to have quick access to:

R12QuickPrefsInventory.png

First you create a folder anywhere in your inventory, named anything you like (you might even already have such a folder at the ready) and fill it with links (or copies) to items you frequently need or, as you can tell from my example, you can put links to any existing outfits you might have.

Once the folder is set up, click the button on the quick inventory tab and you’ll get the floater that lets you navigate to the folder you just created. Additionally, there’s a mini search bar to help you filter down.

I’m sure that as I, and all of you, use this we’ll find more uses for it or things that can be refined or added so if you have any ideas or suggestions, please use the feedback button in the viewer 😊.

Group chat snoozing

“Group snoozing” first appeared in Catznip 5 years ago (and has since been picked up by Firestorm and other TPVs) but it was only ever available through the group chiclet’s context menu so it wasn’t very discoverable (or configurable aside from the debug setting).

R12 adds a per-group option to always snooze group chat when you hit the little x to close group chat, and a way to configure that specific group’s snooze time-out; the “next occurrence” option simply closes the group chat session until the next time someone says something (whether it’s 5 seconds after you close it, or 5 hours) which can be useful if you run a support group for instance.

To configure, go to Communicate / Groups – right-click the group you wish the change the option for and pick “View Info”. The option will be 2/3rd of the way down:

R12GroupSnooze.png

Additionally if you already have group chat open, you can always right-click the group’s chiclet and pick “Group Info” from there to get to the groups properties/profile floater or to snooze the group chat (using the default set).

R12GroupChiclet.png

Finally, you’re also able to manually snooze group chat using the new chat toolbar icon; if you configured closing group chat to always snooze then you can for instance pick “Until relog” to not see group chat until you relog (or until manually reopen it).

R12GroupSnoozeFlyout.png

Chat – “Only join conferences started by friends” privacy option

There’s recently been some griefing that involves joining busy groups only to then start mass-conferences with group members; this option will only accept conference conversations that were started by someone on your friends list. If a conference is blocked you’ll briefly see a toast and a message will be logged to nearby chat.

Additionally, I also provided an option to auto-ignore all group voice calls (note that this doesn’t block voice conferences from friends or non-friends).

R12PrefConferences.png