Context of Context Still Sucks

Making the cone of context appear and disappear when you drag the picker still sucks.

There should be an option to be rid of the pestilent shadow completely and permanently.

The default setting should be OFF.

During this time of grid failure we should take advantage of the opportunity this gives us to rise above adversity and find something positive in this experience. So...

Thank you, oh Lord, for this all too brief but most welcome respite from the intense, indeed, nearly unbearable misery of experiencing the Cone of Context. Amen.

Amen

Lol

I don't want to see the shadow fade in and fade out, I don't want to see the abominable shadow at all.

In over three years of being in Second Life I have never once wanted animated shadows connecting parts of the interface together. I rather suspect I never will.

Please LL, please, I beg you, I implore you, I ask you as nicely and humbly as I am capable of, don't make me look at a freaking shadow every time I want to texture or color something, not even for one instant.

Isn't tying all screen elements together with pixel junk part of Web 3.0?

This is da future, man!

Careful, they'll replace it with an animated Tardis Replication Particle System where the window fade in and out making a hooting sound and emit '60s psychedelic particle auras.

That would rock! Then when you hit the exit the wind twists way into nothingness with a blue flash and a "bing" sound.

Then again all the above would be very annoying as well. We are here to build not to be entertained like little children. At least what they have now is less annoying

If they can just hold off on completely ruining the interface for ten or twenty years I'm likely to be dead; then they can do whatever they want to the interface without having to read me complain. Right after they implement Havoc and finish replacing the spaghetti code with well factored properly documented code that works well enough to use Second Life for one whole sessions without having anything go wrong.

Whoo Hoo, that last one was a bit silly even for nonsense.

The only good Cone of Context is a dead Cone of Context.

It is not all that hard to tell what goes where. I never had a problem with it. Red doesn't look much like oh, green and while floor tile.

Big problem is the whole screen gets covered, and more often than not the texture or color window ends up on TOP of what I was trying to grab, and I have to move the window to get at it. Not user friendly. Cute, but a PITA.

Did you run that one through feature voting and get 500 votes?

You must be new here

Feature voting is a sop to keep customers from complaining. The way Linden coders decide what to do - and LL freely admits this - is to do what is fun for them. It's probably great for coder morale but really lousy for the alleged product.

While hiding the cone of context until the window gets moved is a compromise for the developer who likes this UI feature and the users who don't like it, I second the motion to either disable it completely or make it an option. I can't imagine it to enhance the UI in any way, regardless how much fun it might have been to implement.

Another useful patch for the open source client.

The suckage persisteth.

I know, we can turn it off, but the preferences don't persist through uninstalls, and I uninstall a lot since I install the regular client and the beta client and the first look client and none of them are very stable and there's no reason to think the programmer's attempts to keep them from interfering with each other are succesful.

So I see this cone of context from time to time and I am reminded once again:

The cone of context sucks.

Thats why all three different clients have their own settings files

See C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings

settings.xml
settings_beta.xml
settings_firstlook.xml

And if you really need to uninstall then take a copy of whatever file you want, that will save all the firstview windows popping down as well.

I am aware that all three versions have their own settings files. That's part of what was meant by "the programmer's attempts to keep them from interfering with each other".

The instruction to uninstall other versions of Second Life has been given by Linden programmers following the recent creation of separate setting files. I suspect there was a reason for this. That three such files exist doesn't mean the code that is supposed to write and read them works properly.

The format of the settings files is not fixed enough to make copying old versions of the xml files around properly reliable. As an example, one used to be able to change the HtmlHelpHomePage value in settings.xml. The home page for the F1 browser is no longer governed by this variable in the settings.xml file, instead this has been moved to the floater_html_help.xml in the skins\sui\en-us folder (for the english skin).

The settings files are misnamed, or perhaps being made to serve multiple purposes which would be better served by being split into two different files. They don't hold just user customisation settings, they hold that sort of thing along with values stored by the program such as FocusPosOnLogout and FocusBuildOptionsRect. If these two distinct purposes were served by different files, perhaps the file that holds customization settings chosen by the user could be left intact by the uninstall option, and a "Store User Preferences to local drive" and a "Read User Preferences from local drive" feature could be added the UI. Then you could create different files of just your customization settings for different purposes, not mixed in with the machine determined stuff one finds in the current settings*.xml files.

Also, the program ought to check you start date and not badger you with warnings such as "this is a sandbox" if you've been in SL over three years. Now my mind has been lead to the tooltips telling me what the build button and the snapshot button and the chat button do, which I don't want to see and which can't be made to go away without editing files in the skins folders.

If reusing old settings file is totally reliable, the uninstaller should ask specifically if you want to remove them despite the fact that there is no real need to.


Regardless, the cone of context

Should be based on "last login time" or something. If last login DNE, then give tips.
I don't really care what does it so long as the next time I have to uninstal/reinstall I never ever EVER see those damnable things again (heck, I didn't like them when I was new).

I've forgotten, how do I turn off the cone of context?/