What is "Cool Viewer" and cache and crash whinge

The first simple question is what is this "cool viewer" everyone's talking about? Is it just the very uncool last viewer (i.e. 21)?

For the less tech-head amongst us (i.e. me) I wanna also pass on that the last couple of viewers did a weird thing in relation to cache files. I think its pretty common knowledge that the SL cache has to emptied regularly. I suppose it's also pretty well known that the "in-house" cache emptying thing (via Preferences/Network) doesn't work so well. A manual emptying of the cache is the most reliable way. I mentioned on the Macintosh Users Group on SL why the hell are there no files in what has been the "normal" place for cache files. As usual, someone knew the answer. The last couple of viewers changed the file the cache files are stored in. (Of course we read every word in our release notes, and of course a 6 word description will explain everything - Yeah right).

So for all us ordinary users, before or after playing on SL go to the home folder/Library/Caches/Second Life and there will be cache files. Not surprisingly when I found out about this "secret" and critical change to the viewer I discovered I had about 9,000 files in there. As if the hopeless performance of SL for Macs isn't enough. They go and fail to tell people in a special note that your cache files (notorious for slowing everything up) has been whipped over to a different folder all together!

While on cache files, does anyone know what this file does?: data.db2.x.[followed by 10 numbers]. I've been looking for reasons that I have massive, computer-and-all lock-ups playing SL recently and decided to check cache files. This particular file is 84 meg. A curious thing given the size of the entire viewer.

The last, but not so flippant question. Does anyone know of an SL-like virtual world that actually likes to play with Macs? I'm starting to worry about lock-ups that freezes my entire computer, preceded with a fan working overtime, can't be good. Love SL to death, but not going to take the risk of damaging my computer for the fun of it.

The part of SL that you run on your Mac is open source - anybody can download the sources and change them and connect to SL. The Cool Viewer is one of these. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers for more of them.

You should _always_ think twice before giving your user name and password to _anything_ that isn't owned by LL. I'm sure Cool Viewer (and a number of others) is safe but it's something you should always take a little extra care with.

The cache is just that - it's stuff SL used recently or uses frequently and keeps around on your hard disk instead of downloading them over the network over and over. This can be a big performance improvement but you might want to lower the settings (under Preferences on the Network tab, IIRC) if you have a lower-end machine or you're low on disk space..

Cheers for that Sindy. I saw on one of the threads that a Mac user found a lot more happiness using Cool Viewer. Might give it a fly. I assume its been around long enough to flush out any nasties (e.g. security issues).

On the cache thing...hmmm....maybe I've set the cache level too low. Running MacBook Pro and when I first started using it at the start of the year, SL was a dream. Now a very frustrating experience.

Cheers again.