Non-techy viewer changes

I was wandering around the wiki and stumbled onto the page on how to add a window and noticed that adding a minimize button to anything just involved adding something in a text file.

I've always hated that the inventory window doesn't have a minimize button when everything else does, and ever since they decided to clear the search when you close it it's become outright irritating to me and jumped to my biggest UI pet peeve and the one thing I'd file a bug report over with every new viewer and now it turns out it just involves changing "false" to "true" in one of the xml files .

While I'm probably the only one to get so worked up about something so trivial , it did make me wonder if there are any other annoyances (or personal preferences) that are so "non-technical" to solve?

How, Kitty, how?? Tell me. I need to know!!

In the folder where you installed the viewer, under skins, then xui, then en-us (or a different one if you're using a different language I guess?) and look for floater_inventory.xml. Or simply search for the name of the file.
You can just open it in notepad, it's a textfile.

The very first line should say:
and all you do is change the false I put in bold to true (leave the quotes around it) and save and close the file and log back in

And it's good to know I'm not the only one who's annoyed by it not being there . Although I don't get why they never got around to it if it's so simple .

Thank you so much Kitty. You're so clever!

I have a suspicion that the absence of a minimize button is for a reason. Whether that's true or not, I've just applied your suggestion and added a minimize button to the inventory, I know I will like it.

Outstanding tip! I nominate this for thread of the day. (this is no thread of the day contest)

Resmods, five stars for this thread, please.

Seconded!

Thank you for this tip

The removal of the minimize button from the inventory was a relatively recent change - within the last few versions. I would tell you which version, but I can't seem to find the release notes archive any more. I have no idea why they thought this would be helpful. It will be so nice to have it back!

Excellent!

Kitty just won SL

very nifty tip, Kitty!

i encourage others to reply to thisd thread with any other easy coding tips that you know or stumble across.. which is partially inherent of the 5 stars i rated this thread.

although it seems you could probably wander through the code and find other examples that are just as easy as changing "true/false" statements.

I will pay in beer, blood or other nominated fungible liquids for a hack like this that makes the various pop-up windows float OUTSIDE the SL window so I can use 'em on my second monitor!

Unfortunately that isn't possible

The problem is that the SL User Interface is actually drawn by the same part of the SL engine that draws the view and your avatar! It's all done directly through OpenGL. Modifying SL so that it instead used the OSs own user interface widgets would have a lot of benefits (eg, being able to drag outside the window, plus server lag would no longer slow down how fast you could type) but would also require a huge amount of technical work.

unfortunately - i did read somewhere that linden have no plans to do this - but now it's open source (or whatever) maybe somebody else will

I found something that fixes the "IM window always appears in the lower left corner instead of where you last put it" for me .

It's in the settings.xml file, which I think is in a different place for everyone so probably the easiest is searching for it. It should be somewhere under "Documents and Settings" (on Windows anyway) and in a folder called "user_settings".

1) Find the line that says:
The numbers might differ but the 1 seems consistent on my main puter and the one I use for my alt.

2) Change the 1 to 100 (actual number doesn't seem to matter as long as it's not 1) but leave the others alone

3) Log-on and open the IM window, it should show at the lower left corner still, but a bit further to the right than normal

4) Put it where you want it to go (top right corner for me) and log back off (don't clear cache for this log-off or it won't stick apparantly)

5) Log back on and the IM window is where it should be and if you move it around it'll still be there the next time you log on

Worked on both puters for me so hopefully it's a general solution .

[It seems that as soon as you clear cache it resets back to the lower left corner, although the next relog that doesn't involve clearing cache does leave it in the last spot again. Since I clear cache on every log-off not much help to me but I'll leave it up in case it helps someone else ]

[What are the stars on the thread? ]

Another good tip!

"What are the stars on the thread?" The stars are a part of the vBulletin system that allows people to rate threads. Used to be we could all rate threads. The star system was gamed to the point where so many complaints were produced that star rating permission was reseved to res mods and Linden staff. Something made a res mod or Linden staffer give your useful thread a five star rating. It's a rare honor these days, be proud of it!