Please welcome Howard Linden!

"M says Howard Linden is “a great fit for Linden Lab – rich content creation tools (Pixar), intuitive interfaces (TiVo), 3D worlds (SGI) and a bonus attribute in his passion for education.”

The Question:
What sorts of benefits to your experience of Second Life, via the viewer, would you dream up for someone with Howard Linden’s background?


(you can review the post about Howard Linden here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/02/m-linden-second-life-update-and-welcome-to-howard-linden-aka-howard-look/#comment-621634)

A new body mesh!

Welcome Howard!

Thank Goodness he's not "H" Linden. Welcome, Howard!

Mesh importing sounds like it would be right up his alley.

Flexi sculpties!
Prims and Flexi prims that can attach/link at multiple points, both to other prims and the avatar mesh.

just a note: I watched a friend of mine log on to SL for the very first time, one of the first things he saw was two pose balls 'sit M' and 'sit 'F' and this guy is pretty intelligent and what he did next surprised me, he was thumping away at the M on the keyboard and my assumption was that for whatever reason he was trying to go into mouselook, but when i asked him why he wanted to go into mouselook he said "I want to sit, it says press M to sit".

a priority to teach people new to SL must be that they understand asap that most actions are instigated by clicking with the mouse. I just wondered how many leave because they believe their keyboard doesn't work for them in SL?

Great ideas!

A choice of fuzzy creatures to be on joining. A little flippant but my heart swelled with pleasure on seeing someone come in from Pixar. Hmm .. any chance of a 'lite' version of SL for mobiles?

Bears!! I want bears!!!!!

Welcome, Howard!

/me wonders if he has a duck avatar.

Avatar Mesh revamp thirded (is that even a word?); the MakeHuman team has a fantastic mesh designed precisely for parametric modeling and animation. And it is opensource. At: http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php

Please put a new mini-map in the next client that will not jam. I have been without a mini-map for almost six months. Support told me this is a "known problem" and gave me a complex suggestion to delete something and it MIGHT return. I tried this and it did not work so I contacted Support again. The reply was "we already told you what to do." Isn't there some way to get my mini-map back?

Welcome Howard. Sorry for such a mundane idea but we have a wide range of needs here.

I like the idea of an improved mesh. And extra clothing layers (eg, outer jacket/cape), extra attachment points (we have 'Center 2', how about 'Hand 2', 'Pelvis 2', and so on) so we can wear prim clothes without worrying about blowing away prim parts of avatars.

And an overall audit of the UI to make sure it's consistent and usable... like, let us copy text from dialogs and click on links in dialogs. There's also still areas where text contrast is a problem.

SGI, eh? The home of OpenGL? How about scripted access to shaders?

good idea Argent!

I would like to be able to use the linden tree shader. Would be great to be able to make trees sway in the wind like Linden trees do.

Welcome Howard!

I would love to see the notecard system upgraded with things like fonts and maybe even a spell checker the ability to display embedded images.

I would also love some sort of tabbed inventory system. We already have inventory and recent items tabs, but I would like to be able to make my own tabs rather than scrolling down through the entire thing and opening additional inventory windows.

Also, more viewer skins.

Welcome Howard,

Anyone who has worked with Steve Jobs and understands UI, design, and laser-focused attention to execution detail will be great to have in SL. You've already had excellent suggestions noted above. I just wanted to add my Welcome. Continued high-caliber senior level hires demonstrates LL is in this for the long-haul. Those of us with start-up and post start-up experience appreciate the transition LL is going through. It also reinforces why it is important for us to keep creating content and building a vibrant community.

Ahh, and just as I said I did not have a suggestion. Teleporting to ground level from a higher elevation without falling would be great. I was just on The Citadel in Nautilus (Anath) and tpd to the Nautilus Harbor's boardwalk in Yamm. Since The Citadel is 40 or so m's above Yamm, it's a bit of a drop. It's a little disconcerting to just splat on the pavement although at times this might be considered therapeutic. It takes a few splats for a newbie too realize you can pull up and gently glide to the pavement from a higher elevation.

Oo Nimue....yes inventory improvement!

How about being able to search by creator?

I would even settle for a "My Creations" Tab.

Every time I read about the redesigned and new user friendly viewer I get worried about what would come out of that project. I'm afraid that it will be so dumbed down to accommodate the 1st hour experience, that it will become very difficult to use for experienced users, content creators in particular. People who spend hours and hours online, building content, scripting it, etc.

In any case it would be difficult adjustment for people who have the SL viewer functionality in their muscle memory. I just hope that content creation and advanced usage is not forgotten with all this focus on bringing in new users.

I wrote up a wiki entry for an idea I had for llTreeSystem/llPlantSystem...

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Custom_Linden_Plants

There's also a JIRA for it.

Oh, Howard, could you have a look-see at that?

HTML Notecards, please, with things like "<IMG SRC=name>" coming out of the notecard's contents.

Simplest user interface... edit the notecard, click the "HTML" button, and it displays as HTML. Switch back to add more contents. Rich text editing in HTML mode would be very nice but not absolutely necessary.

Only time will tell if Howard can take the skills he used to create Pixar, and make SL into a quality product. But any business that employs bait and switch techniques to make money, is not relevant in the first place.

I personally would like to see:

a) Attachment points as linked lists; allows any number of items attached there.
b) True multithreading, with threads for UserIO, Network, Graphics, DiscIO - we multicore users are vexed about getting single digit FPS when only 25% of our CPU is being used.
c) Basic tasks being tested and passed by LL QA before the RC is released to the public. It's faster and cheaper to correct "program crashes on right click" in your offices before it gets out to us, so create a script which covers most of the typical basic operations the program must do and ensure it can do them.
d) Builds begun on the previous Bug-fixed version instead of going back to buggy previous versions over and over again. After you fixed a bug, don't put the bug back by using old code again. Lock old versions away and don't allow the programmers access without Project Lead approval - you might stop getting the ancient version of Libcurl and its memory leaks if you deploy a better version control.

Lets see updates to the UI from a person who was involved with Pixar and launched tivo?
Visual inventory. I would like to be able to see a thumbnail for my objects. It could be a small avatar for clothes, a mini-object for object like houses, cars, and stuff and a thumbnail for textures and pics.
real tool tips that give actual explanations like click pie/sit on to sit.
Finally a third location for newbies to go to that isn't the old arrival points like ahern. It needs to be new & age limited. (only employees/mentors/helpers etc) This will solve the newbie griefer problem.

How about iTunes "smart playlist" style smart tabs?

Show items where "Creator" "is" "myself"
And "Type" "is not" "Landmark"

Some very basic things of life, that would certanly be welcomed into second life would be.

a) real functioning weather. rain, snow, lightning storms etc.

b) Ability to add LL water to raised lakes, streems and ponds

c) another tattoo layer on the avatar so that custom makup can be applied over top of custom skins with out taking clothing slots or being done at skin level.


d)ohh and a search that makes sense. One where you can apply filters and Look for results that meet a certain criteria rather then a keyword search alone.

And last but not lease.


e) Lets revamp inventory management.

allow us to sort by creater, by name, by permitions, creation date, aquired date etc.

Inventory by far has been in the need of a new management system for ages.

Welcome aboard Howard!

Just one quick comment here - there are a large number of us that do tens of thousands of dollars of business through the grid, of which Linden Research takes a large part in tier fees. A lot of residents sink or swim with us; last I checked 80% of the regions on the grid are privately held.

Above all, the #1 most important thing is stability and consistency of the platform. I too would love to get rid of a lot of the arcane ridiculousities associated with a too-rapidly-developed platform, but messing with it even a little can do bad, bad, bad things. The last little mistake correction (regarding openspace tier changes) is personally costing me around ten thousand dollars, and I'm one of the lucky ones.

If you are new to this platform - check, check and double check before you change *anything* - for everyone's sake. Then look again three months later.

Please.

I would love to have more real working lights.

As example
- sunligh don't shine through prims
- prim lights don't shine through prims except they are (semi)transparent
- better light reflections on prims with shininess
- real working mirrors.
- reflections on semitransparent prims like windows (as example reflections on Lindenwater)
- more control about lights like one direction only

Don't know if this would be in Howards' remit, but there's a few gaps in the tools landowners & admins have at their disposal.

Firstly a facility to ban attachments in the way we ban avatars, all too often well meaning avs turn up unknowingly wearing attachments that we don't want in our sims. Be nice if they got a warning that they can't complete the Teleport unless they detach item 'x'

On the same theme a way of viewing avatar HUD attachments would be useful.

And for builders, a really useful addition would be in-world Animation Overrider & Sculptie tools, or at the very least a set of off-world SecondLife specific tools.