Notes from the Ground up

Greetings to all.

I would like to take this time to reflect on my experiences that I have had in my time here in Second Life. It's been a week now and would like to share my thoughts while I'm still new. Sometimes it's good to have a fresh pair of eyes. After all this is what beta testing is all about. Test, feedback, test somemore...Anyone is open to share their own views...

I'm going to cover some points ranging from technical to personal, therefore I was at a lost for which forum to post this too. Decided that I can't go too wrong here but if it needs to be moved, feel free to do so.

In SL, so far I have been spending my time wandering around getting to know the lay of the land. Doesn't help that it keeps changing all the time. So far I have bought myself some land, build a cabin, uploaded textures, enrolled in some basic classes to get a feel for the toolsets, completed my first building project of a Lookout tower, attended some events and have met alot of people. I have yet to try scripting yet, even though I have some programming background (as well as CAD/CAM), plan to try it out soon.

As for some other observations:
Logging On
*Clean and simple log on screen, good for people who like to get on fast and get back to work!
*However I feel that the options in the preferences need to be explained abit more. Perhaps with tooltips.
*No problems logging on the first few days, however recently I've noticed that the client stalls at entering region. I put it off to region load, but it happends at everytime I first try to log on. I'll have to Alt-F4 to desktop and try again before I get through.

UI
*feels "cold". Sometimes I feel like I'm messing with Windows Explorer while having a really cool animated background. Perhaps a move away from the normal windows menu naming convention would help.
*Radial Dial at mouse pointer is fantastic...

Inventory
*click-hold-and drag is a welcome feature, so is creating our own folders
*find it strange that there is no way to rez an object without it dissapearing from inventory
*Unable to recieve folders from others, I get the dialog box, but after I accept, the folder does not appear in root. Individual objects are fine though.

Avatars
*The Best ever! nothing else comes close to the amount of flexibility that this allows. Still not able to recreate myself however
*clothing - noticed some problems but can be worked around by using a combination of clothing types. Such as some textures and designs work better as undershirts than normal shirts, but not too much trouble if user is made known of it.
*sometimes I can't see the AV of others, all I get is their names floating in the air, sometimes I just see hats or braclets.Only happends to some AV some of the time.

Building
feel that I need more time to revaluate, however two functions that I would really like to see are
*an undo last option, very useful for people like me
*snap to plane or snap to axis - this would allow connecting objects better, instead of having to do it by hand and judge it by eye.
*tooltips would be very useful for the new user.

economy
*vote booth abuse

Lastly, the biggest selling point for me these last 5 days, is the community. Wonderful group of people in SL, helpful, fun-loving and really caring of their enviroment, their world.

Thank you for you time.

Falchion

just a quicky, if you hold shift and drag an item out of your inventory, it will leave the original in your inventory, and create a copy IW. other than that, good stuff

Ah...
Thanks Nada...that really helps..
I should have been able to figure it out myself...
oh well...helps to ask...

You can use ctrl+z to undo the last thing... but I'm not sure when it stops working.. best thing to do when you made a mistake: FREEZE, take you mand carefully off your mouse and press Ctrl+z quick but nicely... a good chance that it will work then!

Why didn't I think of that?? Thanks so much, this will be very helpful!

First time I just tried it automatically

Objects appear to keep their own undo lists; I love this. If you have cube 1 and cube 2, move cube 1, then move cube 2, then click back on cube 1 and undo, cube 1 will undo that first move. To undo the last move on cube 2, focus on it and undo. Sometimes you'll be hitting undo and it won't seem to work; it's more than likely because you're not focused on the right object.

Textures changes don't appear to undo, and undo on a resize of a whole linked object set has given me very peculiar results from time to time, particularly if I'm undoing rotation.