"Communicate" Window: eeeeee!!!

Now HE appreciated a good sturdy shoe.

GODDAMNIT!!!!! CUT THAT OUT!!!!

Who are you?!

Well screw you guys! I'm going to go get drunk and eat lobster on my boss's'ss''s expense card!

ty everyone who posted those hacks and work around and all that.

shame we have to do that, but I am all cried out, so it is time to get back to running my business without being blinded by chatterboxes

For those who were pointing out rudeness, and flames and all that - wow! Thank goodness you were not around in the glory days of the forums - you would not have lasted a second LOL

This thread is like hearts and unicorns and those kittens I mentioned on my original post compared to the warzone forum/threads of the past hehe!

Anyhow could someone hack me a crying smiley for the next LL oopsie?

Yea they sure made SecondCitizen look tame didn't they? lol

It seems like SL is competing with AOL and MSN chatrooms now. I hope they have good luck because I won't be around to witness it.

Just my 2 Lindens worth, because I need to rant about the Communicate Window, and having listened to friends rant at me, for the past 24 hours, about how they don't like it, here is a good as place as any to let off my own steam.

My first point being, quite simply - I DON'T LIKE IT, Mr Linden!!!!!!!!!

I'm all up for change, but not this particular one. I will try the hack...actually, I am a computer idiot, so I will force my Second Life hating Brother to tamper with it somehow and sort it out for me....but I will try it, and TRY to be positive about it.

The voice feature is totally redundant for me, but I do agree that some people will be delighted with it. I can't ever use it as the PC is shared, and in an area where other folks are. So if I sit here with a headset on, it will be no better than me sitting in the room, on a hands-free kit on my mobile phone...which always gets complaints (they bizarrely don't object to me playing music from the club, dependent on the time of night I'm logging on!) until I leave the room and go elsewhere, because all that the people in the room with me hear, is me holding a one sided conversation, often dotted with random bouts of laughing, and apart from making me seem rather mentally unbalanced, they say my random comments disrupt their TV viewing or whatever, so the text chat, and IM thing is a much better option for me.

The large communicate block, is just frustrating. Its like walking around looking through a net curtain, or badly position Bi-focal glasses (I'd imagine). Then I learned how to separate the IMs window, and ended up with lots of separate screens, none of which told me when someone had commented, so I flicked back and forth through them getting more and more aggravated. Having had 7+ IM's going at one point, even narrowed down to how I used to have them, it was heavy going, as I had to stagger them for ease of flicking. Which left my virtual world view very very restricted, and I really didn't like it.

SL for me was about exploring and meeting people, and enjoying the many forms of musical entertainment. As someone has already posted, and I have to agree, if I'd have wanted to be in a pretty backgrounded chat-room, then I'd have found one.

I personally think it would have been better if Linden labs had kept the previous IM method, in there somewhere. I work as a Host in a busy club, and found it very useful to have the tabs alert me to IMs from either clients, or security, or DJs, etc, so I don't have to keep flicking between separated screens. I have on busy times, had lots of tabs open, and I didn't shut them immediately in case the posters, often foreign, had to think about what they were typing, or indeed were occupied elsewhere before coming back to me. The whole highlighted tab idea really worked well for me...and I liked it how it was. And when I didn't need it open, I minimized it and was engaged in public chat, until I saw there was an IM comment, so I wasn't solely distracted by being in multiple IMs.

I didn't need the friends list open all the time. I logged on, said hi to those I wanted to, and left it at that, unless I wanted to send a quick teleport to one of them, it wasn't a huge deal for me. I actually preferred not to have it up all the time. So I'm hoping the hack will allow me to have that separated and removed only to be accessed when I want.

And the Near Me block...errrmmmm.....why ???? I don't know, but errr....why do I need it? and what are the benefits of it? I've been inworld with this system now for approx 8 hours, and still can't see the point. If I ever wanted a chat history, I merely clicked on the relevant tab and there is was.

Please, please, please Mr Linden....and all you creative designer computer programming, Linden designer folks........Can't I just have the ability to separate the IM bar up, from the communication box, on its on, with the flashy tabs to tell me when people want to talk to me?

If anyone can tell me if I (or my brother) can hack and make it a little more customized, I'd be really really grateful.

Ok....I'm going off to cry now......*sniff sniff*

Yes yes yes.

I'm not going to bother reading through all of this ...

don't like the way the communicate window looks? resize it or tear off the Near Me section and THEN resize it.

As for the complaints regarding the IMs? Gee - you can resize that too! Or for that matter tear them off, just like you could with the old IM interface!

Why people complain about the groups and friends lists being integrated into the window is beyond me - sorry, I HATED having to scroll through all of my groups just to open an IM with someone from the IM window.

The complaint (as I understand it), is not having friends/groups integrated per se, but that you can no longer open those windows seperately from the IM window.

Why would you want that? - well so that you can have the IM window wide and short (so you can see all the tabs for multiple IM conversations), whilst be able to view your friends in a window tall and thin (since friends are a vertical list).

I've posted a Windows XP binary (english only) for download (link and overview can be found at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1917 ) for those who want to play with one way this could be done (however, the usual use at your own risk, non-official, not supported, etc. caveats apply). I know some of the other open source community are also modding the UI. Comments on jira would be extremely useful in convincing LL that changes are needed!

There is also the issue that the minimum size you can resize the various new windows is too large (Farallon and Darien have posted mods for that).

Matthew

If you didn't use the friends window and preferred the old "New IM" instead, that's perfectly fine. A lot of other people preferred doing the same thing through the friends window instead. The key was that there was different ways to accomplish the same thing and you settle for whatever way is best for you.

The new communicate window takes that choice away and forces (if you didn't use "New IM" in the past) to jump through hoops to do the same thing you used to, and it's more clumsy on top of that.

Letting the old History be docked with IMs was a good idea, I'm sure there are people who prefer it that way. Taking away the friends and groups windows on the other hand is a horrible idea since it doesn't improve anything.

The lindens put in charge of the communications window are being real @$$hats for not thinking about whats good for the customer. They seriously should be fired replaced with people more willing to listen to the customers. They fail miserably! I can't even believe it myself.. They let this crap go live though we even had lindens who were against it. What would please a lot of people, would be to put everything back how it was, and just add the new features to those separate windows. yea all the newbies who are used to the new design may moan about it, but they haven't been here as long as the rest of us who are used of a traditional friends list that scales vertically.

Many thanks to the person who posted the hack to allow that gargantuan Chatterbox to be resized smaller! I hacked mine and now can reduce it to 72 pixels high, which shows me 4 lines of text in either a "near me" window or a tabbed IM window, without undocking or tearing off anything. It's almost back to normal use, with that hack added. Why they felt you shouldn't be allowed to resize it smaller than 240 pixels high is a complete mystery to me.

Now if we can only have a hack that puts everything back in it's own window again.

Forget the JIRA hacks/fixes.

We all know LL will never admit they screwed the pooch on this.

Personally, I'll be using open sourced clients from now on. Ones that let you adjust the Vocie options in the land tab, but let you keep the old IM system. In other words, using Clients made by people that actualy have a CLUE as to what is best for SL users. OPTIONS!!!!!

~Jessy

Y'know, all this time I've been wondering what people are all upset about, because the Communicate window isn't that different from what we had before. And I rather like some of the changes, like putting the friends and groups list in one place. But I noticed this morning, I am finding it annoying that you can't resize the window down as much as the old IM window.

When that client is produced i would like to know about it.

Mostly the only thing that irritates me is the friends list. I liked it how it was before. The friends list is a important part of my SL, and it's no longer conveniently placed to where i can get at it anymore. I would also like the history window revered too. I have no idea what possessed those lindens to mess with something that wasn't broke, but they do that all the time anyway.. and guess what? They break it. :/

As mentioned above, I've done one which has seperate windows for friends and groups (but Windows XP only - use at own risk etc.)

http://folders.live.com/self.aspx/K8N1a2UOg2A/secondlife/SecondLife-MD.zip

for the files and

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1917

for the commentary and screenshot.

Matthew

I rather like the new communicate window, but it took me a while to figure out who that Near Me person is and why they keep IMing me. I've always thought the SL UI is too big and obtrusive, but I run SL at 1600x1200 with the UI scale set as small as it will go and that's tolerable. To those that are running SL at 800x600 and complaining that the UI takes up all your real estate, well, yeah, of course it does. 800x600 has been below the minimum recommended screen resolution for modern operating systems for at least five years. Eventually you have to accept that it's time to upgrade. I can understand your frustration because I find running SL at even 1024x768 pretty intolerable, but you can't really expect software designers to design their UIs for systems that are 5-10 years out of date.

I run at 1280 1024 and still find it to be intolerable. It has nothing to do with computer age. The layout of the new window is just not usable in the same fassion as we are all used to. It frustrates those of us who have been burned into using a speccial layout for 3 years. Heck not even microfsoft does this. They may change the look of windows each version, but the menues are still in the same places.


Thank you, i must have missed that post. I could edit the XML of this to reflect the classic appearance of the friends list, whats most important is that it's in it's own window.

That's not entierly fair though, Chip. I run at 1280x1024, which is the most my monitor can do, and my monitor was expensive as all hell a couple years ago when it was new (Viewsonic LCD). I'm hardly 5-10 years out of date. And SL's interface has always been too cumbersome, yes, but this update just made it worse.

I hear ya. My Viewsonics cost over $1000 ea. when I bought them two years ago. Better ones are only $600 now. But 1280x1024 isn't 800x600. It's pretty hard to argue that if you're limited to 800x600 that you're not running a system that's pretty far out of date now. I think a lot of it has to do with people buying laptops and then being stuck with them. People who don't truly need the mobility should avoid buying them. They get obsolete twice as fast as a desktop that can be upgraded. Even my computer is pretty much out of date now. It's AGP 4x and I'm running an 8x graphics card on it without getting the full benefit, and you can't even buy computers with AGP slots in them anymore.

I love the new window. SL has finally made a sensible download. It actually makes SL more manageable and is multi-taskable. If there is such a word.