3rd party software I'd pay money for

With all the talk of evil borgs pluging bot into the grid to steal out thoughts etc, I thought I'd start a nice, positive thread about thrid party software and what it might be nice to have.

So, when the open source community really kicks in on SL, what software would you like to see? What tools would you be willing to pay good money to have to make SL better, or is the viewer alone enough for you?

Vale

Just a viewer that runs stably, as quicly and with as little lag as possible within my system limits and I'll be fine.

One idea I've had in my head for a long time is 'SL Lite'. A really basic viwer without any of the building tools etc that would run quickly on pretty much anything. There are times when I need all the bells and whistles of the main SL viewer and there are times when I just want to hang out with friends and chat. There's also a whole world of people who can't get SL to run on their system so never make it into the grid.

Vale

Not a bad idea. I have little interest in building personally, so something lie that would be useful to me as long as it has the basic editing features.

Have you tried IRC? It's a lot more stable than SL lately

Two bits of software I'd most like to have:

An stand alone building tool. I'm used to building in world now, but it's not the best way to go about it, can be a little like keyhole surgery at times. I'd love a nice, multi window 3D editor specificaly for SL, preferably with the ability to render shadow maps to the textures.

An out of world inventory sorter. I'd love to be able to sort my inventory out with somthing like windows explorer. My inventory is a mess, it's so difficult to get everything sorted out in world, with the inventory window in world and IMs from friends popping up, not to mention all the distractions SL has to keep us from getting sensible things done

Vale

My god, it's like being blind! O_O

How can you chat to people when you can't see them or poke their xcite parts?

Vale

Being primarily a builder, I'd love to have a viewer with built-in building tools ... say the ability to have constant grids visible to help with prim alignment, the ability to turn on constant floating text over prims displaying their XYZ positions, etc.

There IS such a program! It is the non-graphical client, SLEEK. Check it out.

Rock

What is IRC?

Thanks, Rock. Sounds interesting, but Windows only, it would appear. Anyway here's the URL: http://delta.slinked.net/programming/sleek/

Internet Relay Chat. You get to sit around chatting to friends, you can IM them for more personal stuff, you get the all powerful channel owners who can eject you from their "land", there's scripts to respond to others scripts (think xcite, but with wet trouts) and it runs on hundreds of thousands of servers, sometimes even using networked servers (only we don't use fancy terms like "grid".

Unlike SL though, your chat wont magically travel into the next room (channel) and it's been around long enough to be mostly stable

Trout - Sounds like you're using mIRC

Look at the homepage of your internet service provider. If you see something says Chat that is close to IRC. The text on your screen at SL is what you see on IRC (no AVs). Want to IM you get that too. That's all so can be servers can be pretty crap without dying. Demand for IRC with Avatars too is why SL is here.

Ever see on the news about the perverts pretending to be 12 years old and meeting with another 12 year old to abuse them - IRC
Need an illegal copy of an MP3 - IRC
Hunting for a Virus - IRC
Want some free porn? - IRC
Want to get off talking about watching women on the toilet? - IRC
Want to play at "War" (try to kill your friends copy of the client or Windows) - IRC
Want to .. the list goes on.

Try www.mirc.com if you want to risk the above.

Andrew

Checked it out.. looks like the tasty IRC client I dream of... except it doesn't seem to really work.

LOL Vale! I've not tried the IRC thing but ICQ after meeting my RL fiancee in a forum some 8 years ago now!
Yes! text only chat was enough to get to know someone well enough to 'bond' and want to meet in RL.
And you know what? Some people managed to do that with writing letters before that. They were called pen-pals. My sister made friends with a girl from South Africa back in the 60's who immigrated and became great family friend.

It saddens me that with all the technology at our fingertips these days, many peoples opening words to total strangers are 'you want sex?'

I use sleek to log in an alt and catch a few people on IMs. I don't log Ace on it because I don't know how it would mess up things like missing offered inventory (notecards etc). But it does work as a chat only thinger- mostly useful for IMs of course.

On a slightly different tack, would you use any kind of SL related mobile tools? If so what? Presence, IM, L$ balance, would you consider any of these useful in a mobile application-and if so would you be willing to pay for such an app?

I like what Vale suggested very much: offline building and inventory storage and sort.

As well, I would like a portable music player like my iPod that I can carry with me while I'm exploring so I can listen to the music I like since for some reason, except for groove salad, most people's music choices don't appeal to me.

Also, an easier way to give calling cards since it is easier for a new person to find the add a friend button and I just can't add anymore temporary friends...it just doesn't work.

A list of people that have paid me, for what products and in witch shop. (I have several shops)
Same thing: the people that I have paid.

By portable I didn't mean in world 'tools', I meant what would you find useful in a super scaled down SL client that could run on your cellphone Obviously an actualy viewer would be out of the question, but some of the more information-oriented stuff might be possible.

and how do i make money? lol and now we got the naked avatar client on slx, to which i had to chuckle and read the discussion posts, i wonder what next?

A programme I used some years ago (Adobe Atmosphere) you could use an actual photograph of your face that was mapped onto the avatar..... sortta dispells the vision of that big busted blonde with an hour glass figure, now sporting zits, greasy hair and a beard.

Of course, for a change in openning lines, you could sign up for There.com, the usual openning line was 'have you got any spare change?'. There must be some weird translation somewhere that makes There.com=Hobos retreat.

sounds like a good idea! though without being able to see things i wouldn't be able to fully organize. maybe just having a texture preview would help.

I think offline building is probably the biggest requested feature tool to have. Atleast for me.

A non-OpenGL native normal Windows style client.

A normal full featured SL viewer that lets us use the mozilla browser, including ability to log in to the forums here, and plays sound.

An app that exports our inventory to our hard drives - so we have the information about folder structure and UUID we are expected to provide when requesting help with missing inventory items.