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Second Life 2.0: A sneak peek at the new user-interface [updated]
This week we managed to get a look at an early build of what calls itself Second Life 2.0 – though the final version numbering is up for grabs and it could wind up being called 1.24 or 1.25 yet but Linden Lab has been amending their Second Life trademarks to allow "2" to be added. The only really major changes in 2.0 revolve around the user-interface that interactive design agency Big Spaceship has been working on for the last 6-8 months. And quite a change it is. We're under no illusions that the new user-interface is entirely set in stone. A few parts are confusing, and it has a ton of rough edges and little quirks. It's fascinating to see the direction that it's going in, however.
Lab rearranges viewer development. Adults-only content trumps other work
Over the next week or so, we've been expecting a new Second Life viewer release-candidate (1.23), with the usual slew of bug-fixes, and stabilization enhancements (1.22 yielded a 20% drop in overall viewer crash rates), and very likely the first real release of the dynamic shadows code. Now, it seems that that is not to be. 1.23 is being pushed out to (probably) June, and the focus for this next release-candidate series will be code-support for the new Adults-Only content category. We're not sure how much of the regular fare will make it into 1.23, as just the AO-content support promises to be quite a substantive code-drop, and it's something that needs to 'just work'.
A chat with Benjamin Linden: LL and Big Spaceship collaborate on user-experience
Linden Lab announced that it has signed on interactive design agency, Big Spaceship, as a key part of its strategy to rework the user-experience, user-interface and signup system for Second Life. The project has been dubbed the UX (User eXperience) project. Big Spaceship, in fact, has apparently been onboard with the Lab for some little while now -- we're only really just hearing about it. We had the opportunity to steal a bit of time with Benjamin Linden (otherwise known as Ben Glenn) who is a Director on Linden Lab's User Experience team and talk to him about Big Spaceship's involvement. Ben is primarily responsible for the user interface design of the Second Life viewer. Along the way we learned a lot about the Lab's reasoning behind this project, the goals they were shooting towards, and how they intended to achieve them.
