A semi solution to unorganized and cluttered inventories.

I have heard many people complaining about how cluttered their inventories are. Of course, this is partly their own fault, but LL could certainly assist in organization a little bit more. Of course, they help a little bit already, for example. Scripts go to the script folder, gestures to the gesture folder. and objects to the object folder, BUT we would really like to organize those objects! I have divided my objects inventory into several folders. Vehicles, Weapons, Shields, and so on. So what if people that built objects in SL could put them in a class from something like a dropdown list. That way when a new object went to your inventory, if it was classified as a vehicle it could go to the vehicle folder and so on.

Hmm, that would be neat, even custom icons would help significantly. I think the main problem with untidy inventory for me anyway is just how unintuitive a list interface is for organising things. To drag something from the bottom of my objects folder to a folder above it, I either have to drag it all the way up to see it, or open a new window, which is rather messy and a clumsy way of doing things. I'm a big fan of Mac OS X's column view:



Basically the contents of your root folder (ie my inventory and library) appear on the left, in SL's case this could be done as tabs along with recent items. When you choose one, you get the first column which is the contents of this folder you chose. Clicking another folder opens that, so you now have two columns (or three without the tabs), the right-most being the deepest level, to its left is its enclosing folder and so-on.
Clicking an item brings up a column displaying that item's properties.
The left and right scrollbar allows you to look at previous/next columns, overall it is much more intuitive, and far superior to list view. Not as immediately obvious as a plain icon view, but MUCH better than a basic list view.

In addition, grouping items by name in some kind of version history would be EXCELLENT. ie: I have 10 items named "Current project", all of which are the same object with slight changes and in the same folder. Instead it would appear as one object with a different icon and would expand just like a folder to show each version (indicated by the time created/modified). Essentially an automatic folder for builders.

You know what would work even better? (At least for me)

Give people the option to saving objects under whatever directory they want. Right now I have a building directory for stuff I build, but when I save an object, it always goes into the object directory first. I then have to go and drag it into the place it needs to be. I would love to be able to right click an object and select "Take" or "Copy", and have it ask me what directory I want to save it in.

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Good idea.

Yeah I agree with that. Instead of just accepting something and having it blindly land in your inventory, they could allow you to save it wherever you want. That really bugs me about folder inventory items. They just end up smack at the bottom.

We definitely need some solution to organizing our stuff.

What I do in the meantime is create lockers, objects that contain other objects, to store stuff that are complete and which I won't access frequently.

It's already helping me in scripts. I just rez the locker, click on it to open then I can access the pieces of script I need or put in new ones. If I added someting I take the locker and move the older one to backups. If nothing was added I just delete the locker where it stands.

I'll second that, something like this would save me so much time.