Ideas for future SL Mac Clients

Just curious on what features you would like to see in future Mac Clients.
As Macintosh computers in SL are all running on OS X and have features you don't see on PC I thought this would be a good discussion.

Example - What I would like to see in a future release.
As you all know Macintosh OS X as a very good text to speech engine. In future release of Leopard Steve Jobs say the voices will be even better. Basically any text you have on the screen you can highlight and with one press of a button (mine is F12) it will read it back to you (mine is Victoria). This is great for proof reading your email or documents. Well SL Chat is just a text stream. You would thing it could be piped to Macs Speech engine this way you could hear the other person talking to you.

Better performance....

no more lag

better video card (thats actualy mac's issue..)

spending more then 1 hour a week on the mac client
uhmm....
oh yeah!

have the damn mac client stop crashing so many times!

If, as a developer, i would'nt know it was a huge task, i would say : rewrite native. The client is a large and complex project. I'm sometimes astonished it does not crash more. Given the size of the code, it is quite stable. The few crashes we experience are minor, in comparision to comparably-sized, multiple platform, server-tied applications. It embeds QuickTime and OpenGL, which are not the simplest API in the world. But... it is slow.

I've seen several posters here who seem to think that the Mac client is running under emulation. Dunno why. The Mac client is universal so it IS native.

Most MacPPC code (well, within the last couple of years, anyway) can be converted to Mactel code with just a few tweaks and a recompile, as long as the developers followed Apple guidelines. The only real difference between the two architectures is byte order (and as a network application developer, LL should definitely know about byte order). Apple even has an abstraction layer that presents a uniform API for both Altivec and SSE.

Actually, I don't think SLmac has ever crashed on me. SLxp has on several occasions. I run both SLmacppc and SLmactel, and both have never crashed. In fact I'm more likely to be kicked out by a sim crash than a client crash. The performance has also been pretty good.

MULTIPLE WINDOWS PLEASE!

I have multiple monitors and when I script I often absent-mindedly try to drag one of the script windows over to the other monitor. Doh!

When I script I can have anywhere from 5 to 20 script windows open. And then someone drops by for a visit and I have to shift everything around so that I can actually see what my av's doing.

I know that a single frame window with multiple cramped child windows is what Winblows users are used to (dunno why, maybe because they can't keep track of so many windows at a time, maybe because each window takes up so much screen realestate), but it is decidedly un-Mac-like.

I should think that leveraging the OS's text editing/rendering and windowing capability, rather than reproducing it in OpenGL, would be a total no-brainer. Ah, but these are Linux people -- makes sense -- Linux has no text rendering or windowing capability --

It would be fun to use the iSight camera built into most Mac's. Not sure where that would go in the SL client.. maybe as an option in the profile window to take your snapshot?

Better dual-monitor support. I tried to use mirroring but that didn't even work with SL. Works fine with WoW.

Send snapshot to iPhoto?

A Dashboard widget that tells me how much money my products are making me. Maybe that would inspire me to actually make and sell something.

Yes I agree with the above comments - better Dual monitor support. When I tried to move the SL client over to my 20" dual display my avatar turned black and lost all its texture.
Another feature that would be good but not Mac specific is a way to save your chat session to a text file. Many time I get into a conversation and then quit SL and wish I could go back and read the chat session so I can bring up and expand on discussion points that were raised.

Another far future idea - wouldn't be great if there was an interface between SL and something like Dragon Natural speaking (speech to text recognition software) so people that are disabled or can't type very well can use SL.

There are options to do this under Preferences -> Communication. Log Chat, Log IM, Show end of last IM conversation. Is that what you mean?

No more new Bugs, just get the paformance increased. I ued to have a better experience on my old 800mhz Powerbook 12" than i currently have on my 24" duo core iMac

The way the client doubled in size with the release of the universal code suggests to me the universal bit was just bulked onto the old code.... re write from ground up...

That horrific memory leak in the Mac client plugged

Lack of responsiveness. Especially noticiable in the textedit windows wich runs at 1/100 the speed of a local textedit. Backspacing in the chat box is horrible, at the point i prefer leave a typo rather than backspacing and retyping. It makes me think that each character is sent to the network, but why? Same for the script editor. What need to send anything to the server before hitting Save? It feels like it is written in Java. Great for portability, bad for performance.

Hmmm, not that I disagree with you on having to send every keystroke, but I generally don't have an issue with an unresponsive client. However, I do live in San Francisco, LL's home city, and where the grid physically resides. Perhaps I just suffer less lag?

>Flash Ferguson
>There are options to do this under Preferences -> Communication.
>Log Chat, Log IM,
>Show end of last IM conversation. Is that what you mean?
Thanks flash for the tip. I noticed it but it was greyed out, found out you have to be in world for you to check that and set the path location.


>Jeff Kelley
>Lack of responsiveness. Especially noticiable in the textedit windows
>wich runs at 1/100 the speed of a local textedit. Backspacing in the
>chat box is horrible, at the point i prefer leave a typo rather than
>backspacing and retyping.
Absolutely typing in a chat can be frustrating from the lag. It's like typing on a old mainframe terminal "hit a key wait a second to display". Your right - back spacing is madding slow and laggy in a crowded region. When it get real bad I open a Text edit window and type in that, then cut and paste in the chat box.

I live in France and have to cross Level3 trans-atlantic link, then Internap. Of course, LL is fast at SF. It is even faster at Linden Labs since they don't ride the internet.


I had overlooked it, but the reason is obvious: chat goes through the network character-by-character to trigger sound and animation. The technology in use does not allow for asynchronous editing and communication with the network.

So there's your problem. You should suggest that the next feature to be rolled into the Mac client should be relocation to LL.

Ability to cut and paste between SL and other apps such as text edit or Word - or Safari.

Spellcheck. SL needs a spellchecker. Oh please, please please. Sl sooooooo needs a spellchecker so you can eliminate typos before hitting enter. It would improve the game experience no end.

This already works for me =S
If I'm scripting and everything suddenly goes slow or I get suspicious behaviour, I copy my scripts into a text-edit window in case they won't save (e.g if the sim crashed).

If someone sends me a link I copy/paste it into Camino, since I've set that up to appear on my second monitor, whereas Safari would cover up SL.

I would like all the things mentioned, but most importantly better performance. The reason it doesn't run well isn't because it isn't compiled to run natively, but because it is written to be strictly cross-platform, whereas there are some areas of the program that could be better implemented on OS X by writing a different module for it. It's common in big software projects to have variations on some parts of the code for each OS you compile for, since some have APIs that you can use to greatly improve things.
However, much of the performance trouble would be alleviated if SL would just be multi-threaded and thus take advantage of multiple cores and multiple processors.