New Enter-Key "functionality"

Well, If you really -have- to keep the 'tab cycles through buttons' thing... Make it so the space bar or something (other than Enter) open and closes the buttons, so we can use Enter to chat, every time. Either that or make a new shortcut to open the chat. An even better idea would be to make the controls completely customizable. There should be a Chat button, and a Click button. I remember some left-handed people asking to be able to change the movement controls to ijkl instead of wasd, so every control should be included.
Hope you like my ideas, I think most people would agree with them.

Ok. So are you saying that with 100+ people voting for the "feature" to be reverted to the way it was, you are going to revert it; or is the entire quote above a method of saying "We know it's not going over to well, but instead of reverting back, we are going to try something else."?

To be like most normal windows applications, we would need to be able to access the file menu by pressing Alt-F, the Edit menu by pressing Alt-E, etc.

Once having accessed the file menu by pressing Alt-F, we should be able to right arrow over to the Edit menu, View menu, etc.

If we click on File, so the File menu drops down, then click on the double bar that detaches the file menu, then we can use the arrow keys to move from main menu to main menu, but we can't arrow from menu to menu until we have clicked on the detach bar.

To be fully accessible from the keyboard, the toolbar tab order would need to allow tabbing from the top row of buttons and controls, the History, chat entry, Say, row and go to the bottom row of the toolbar, the IM, Chat, Friends, etc. row. At present the tab order wraps back to the beginning of each row.

The programs I use don't use detachable menus, and they are all far more industry standard conformant than SL, so having detachable menus may be nice in someone's eyes, but it is probably more a step away from being like common programs.

The programs I use also don't have a mouseover glow on extremely rounded buttons, for that matter.

<sarcasm>Also, the programs I use that allow one to adjust something's size, position, and rotation don't allow the object to snap back after you make the adjustment. </sarcasm>

Suz, you have a point there. Why make the UI all keyboard accessible when you can't do anything else really with the keyboard? How do you bring up a pie menu with the keyboard? How do you build? People that can't use the mouse already have a built-in mouse-mover in the Windows Accessibility Control Panel.

Also, so far as industry standards go, programs that have a workspace for content creation and a good many tools with with to create the content, such as Photoshop, Corel Paint, and the like, typically allow one to dock the toolbars and dialog boxes and other interface elements, so if conforming to industry standards means being designed in a way similar to the useful way that other programs are, dockable toolbars would be a nice thing to add.

Probably "industry standards" means some academic sounding document written expressing ten cent ideas with thousand dollars words, though, instead of meaning -
"being like the programs that are in use by millions of people, programs that have had many years of development and have had to please a lot of people in order to survive against the competition".

I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this, but the fact is that changing the way the enter key works on the chat window *breaks* something that worked fine before, and has become a problem for literally every user I've asked about it. This isn't one of those things where some people are for it and some are indiferent and the majority of them don't like it. I have not met *anyone* who doesn't seriously dislike it.

The fact this this is a more standard behavior for "other MMO's" is *not* a good reason to do it in SL. SL is not like other MMO's. The primary focus of SL for most users is interaction through chat. It is not a combat or activity based game. As such no other feature than chat carries more weight for the user and as such should be as simple as possible to use.

I've commented before that these changes feel like the sort of thing that would be come up with by someone who isn't actually in-world using SL enough to have a real feel for what is and is not a good change and your coments serve to reinforce my fellings on the matter.

I don't want to be insulting with this comparison, but most of these updates have the "feel" of a Windows version update, where after installing it, I scramble around looking for a way to turn off the pretty new "features" and restore actual functionality.

Power users, peole who's wireless mouse loses power, etc. are a tiny, and infrequent minority of people. I would as that instead of debating this issue, trying to preserve these changes, trying to make SL conform to some "industry standard", that don't really apply to something like Second Life.

Please don't be like Microsoft, please don't look for ways to keep the new bells and whistles and give short shrift to the actual current users who seem to be universaly having problems. Please just shut off these changes, and give us back our old, *working* enter key functionality.

Currently:

Keep it 4 3.25%
Change it back 113 91.87%

You know, it does speak for itself.

I fail to see why it's so important for LL to make SL behave like every other crappy online game out there. I'm a former player of Star Wars Galaxies and when SOE in their infinite wisdom decided to make that game look and feel like everything else out there, players cancelled accounts in thousands.. Is this the effect LL is looking for?

I say, bring back the functionality that we have been used to and love. That goes for the TAB to look at speaker as well.

Sincerely,

Ayly Mirabeau

Stop it! Please! Stop -breaking- the interface, stop implementing shiny new features, and STOP changing the build interface! This chat nonsense is obnoxious at best. At the very least, give us a checkbox option to turn this crap off, and *PLEASE* restore the build interface to its state in 1.8! The current texturing system has only one highlight, that being the eyedropper, and it STILL doesn't show the name of the texture -- bring back the old texture interface! The ability to only influence prim parameters one at a time ensures that if you start building something 'metal' and forget to turn the material type to 'Metal' at the start, you have to adjust ALL of those prims manually one at a time using a dropdown box. Stop neutering the build system! We don't *WANT* "WoW" inspired interfaces, "industry standards", or other buzzwords!

The "new behaviour" of Enter is a total and heinous disaster. There is no justifiable reason for leaving an "input focus" around the Inventory button once I've clicked on it, just to frustrate me trying to use Enter to chat to people.

If you'd like to make SL keyboard-centric, then make sure there's easy keyboard hotkeys to the "bottom button" functionality and make sure they're well-known or easy to discover. Don't wreck the fundamentals of the chat interactions just because you think it might be nice.

Dear God NO!!!! It is bad enough now, doing the "Linden Leap" every time I try to have a conversation. Closing it on every press of the ENTER key would be even worse! How about going back to the way it was?

What sort of program have they got the notion they want to make the interface like, games or content creation programs?

It worked exactly like many MMORPG's worked. you hit enter to focus chat, then typed messages and hit enter again to send. Now, I do NOT know wht genius at LL thinks this new system is logical or intuitive....but I do know since they started it I have seen a lot of folks jump, then direct curses at LL, then speak.

Don't even mention that steaming pile of horse-s**t that they pumped out and called a new snapshot interface. I'd take the old one back in a heartbeat.

I happen to like it, though I will need to get used to it.

It allows me to switch in between walking and talking rapidly without having to take hands off the keyboard. At the least, this should be an option that I can keep on.

I'd be glad if they made it an option, Hiro...have a checkbox for the power uses and the disabled (the two groups the lindens say they were doing this for) and have the OLD interactivity when the box is unchecked. I do NOT want to have to relearn the interface every frigging patch....minor changes sure, but this is a bit much to foist off on a 'use it or quit' manner. If this is an XML interface, then it should be easy to have two setups, one for the power user and one for everyone else, that the end user could choose.

Linden Leap?!?! BWAHAHAHAH! Now I have a name for this bizzare behavior I have done and have watched in groups....enough folks trying to talk at once and it can resemble the wave

This is NOT even an industry standard, Lee. I've played about every MMORPG out there except the all PvP ones, and the vast majority of them use enter to focus chat window, not the last window I was in....I have NEVER hit enter and had inventory open and close just because it was the last thing I had used like SL is doing now. Enter has ALWAYS been chat focus in most online games, so you HAD industry standard for the online entertainment industry before....I am not sure what industry you are trying to standardize with at this point.

Since this is an XML interface, how hard would it be to have a checkbox that caused SL to load a new/old enter functionality XML file? To my understanding, XML is supposed to make such design issues easier....soo....give us a choice rather than dropping these kinds of changes in our laps with little or no warning.

let disabled and cordless mouse users have an option for using the enter key to push buttons. let me have an option to have it always open/close chat. let kitties make it so the enter key always plays a mew sound effect, etc... options are good!

At the very least, how about an option in the PReferences that lets you re-map your keys to whatever you want them to do? Other MMORPGs allow you to do this, a lot of other games allow you to do this, that way users can set up their keyboards to do exactly what they want them to do, and the system can dynamically display what key is currently configured for that particular option. For example, pressing 'T' for talking in Half-Life, or most other FPS's. Perhaps pressing 'T' will /reliably/ open up the chat window, and pressing enter will close it. Pressing T will always shift your focus from whatever you were doing, allow you to chat, and then return focus to whatever it was previously on.

Simply allowing users to configure their own keys to do whatever they want would be a very neat, perhaps very simple, and most rewarding option, I think.