Again: Fix Communicate Window

Okay, I am going to repeat myself again, I don’t feel I’m being heard.

Friends, groups, chat history and IM need to be in

FOUR SEPARATE RE-SIZABLE WINDOWS.

Imagine the following:

A meeting of twenty avatars, not all of whom can voice (some are on Linux or at work), all of them talking at once, so the chat history is moving nonstop.

My avatar is walking around meeting people, showing them inside, looking for security issues. My voice is on, for security’s sake.

Every two to five minutes a new IM comes in, and it will not wait; some of them will become conversations. Eventually ten of them are open at once, making a horizontal band across the top of my screen, which means I have to tab across it to catch new blinking tabs. Yes. I’m talking to all ten of them AND running the meeting.

People are requesting teleports, so I have to Search. People are requesting to join the group, so I have to pull up group Info.

ALL THIS IS GOING ON AT ONCE.

How the hell am I supposed to be able to do this with the new Communicate window and still see any part of a 3D world?

you can't ...
and again that needs to be fixed its a mess even with just the window set as small as it goes!

I agree with you. But apparently in the world of the Lindens, we are all supposed to upgrade our hardware to 20" or greater cinema displays and high-end video cards, so we can run SL full-screen on that huge display, just to have room for their cumbersome User Interface.

Why fix the feature they screwed up, when they can just force all of us to do hardware upgrades?

Bleah.

You can resize that window. I make it longer and shorter, and it doesn't bother me at all.

I do have a 19" screen though.

The IM/Chat windows are resizeable and 'tear-off' you can have as many windows open as your want. More than the four that you are requesting.

And the forums are pretty much ignored for feature requests. Use Jira. There are already dozens of such issues open:

Meta-Issue: Usability suggestions for new voice/chat Communicate window
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1076

Complaining here falls on deaf ears. If you really want a bugfix or a feature, vote in Jira. =^.^=

The funny thing is, I do have a large monitor. But I'm nearsighted and not getting any younger, so I run in 800 by 600 even so. And who wants a big blob on the screen anyway?

If you don't tear Chat History off the Chatterbox, you can't resize it to any smaller than 2x the current Chat History minimum height. If you do tear it off, it can be resized as small as it is now. But WHY should I have to go through the completely unnecessary extra step of opening all those other things and tearing off Chat history when all I want is to open chat history?

But while you can tear off and resize the IM windows, that gives you one seperate IM window for each new conversation. There is no tabbed IM access unless you keep the Chatterbox on screen. With the current system I can have a single inch-high window open for IM's, and have a single inch-high chat history mostly overlapping that, and I can rapidly manage chat history and ten or more IM threads. With the Chatterbox, at the very best, that interface takes up at least twice as much screen area, no matter what I do.

The current User Interface works perfectly fine for IM's and Chat History. We do NOT need all that other junk spliced onto it!

Quoted for Effect.

/me agrees

This is the last place I’ll post this quote. Don’t want to be accused of spamming.
Anyway…I’ve used the JIRA…voted on the fix for the communication window like so many others, and spoken directly to Lindens about this
I’ve looked forward to voice on the main grid and main viewer. But I totally agree that this Communication window is too intrusive for anyone who doesn’t want to use voice. Maybe they will fix it. But…

07-10-2007, 02:38 PM

well since it's now been released, that kinda blows all that out the airlocks... LL FAILS again. :/

I agree, very inconvenient.
Maybe we need a petition going? It's obvious that LL is not listening.

Temp fix:
/142/8f/201571/1.html

Yes... bring back the old chat, IM, friends window....

The new one is ungainly, messy, and a major pain in the arse

Has it been changed since this was posted? I finally downloaded the voice viewer expecting to find some big clunky communications window and was happy to find it's half the size of the im window in the sl without voice version. It can't be made shorter up and down but can be made narrower side to side. And im's can be torn out and made teensy tiny.

Hasn't changed at all. Hopefully the person who made that mod to separate the friends list from that mess, will continue to update it along wtih furute SL versions or at least release their source so dale or nicholaz could make use of it. LL has failed us again.

Benjamin indicated that they would consider tearing off the friends list from the communicate window, but they wouldn't restore the friends button to get the torn off friends list (in the same way History works now), because tearing off windows is considered to be "Advanced" and not newbie-friendly.

I might have misunderstood though, and I didn't make his office hours on Thursday to ask for clarification, since a torn off friends list without a button to hide/show it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense .

Unless I am mistaken... I have a History button that opens the 'History window' and not that 'near me' window cluttering up the IM window... Only Friends and Groups are still lumped together.... or is this only when I disable the voice chat?

Sadly it's permanent :/ This is why i hope one of the popular 3rd party clients can at least give us back the friends and groups lists how they once was. I've been using this 3rd party hack that does just that, and it doesn't touch the communications window it basically clones the friends/groups lists and puts the clone in it's own window. However i know that patch day is soon and it will be useless then.

It is sad that no one has taken up the gauntlet and created a skinnable version of the client window, developed off the back of the open source project. Money isn't the issue, I approached many corporates with a sound business model/reason to skin the client, some said 'Second Life Who?'... others said 'Maybe later when the 'game' has enough real users'. Okay, the first batch of potential corporates were looking at the skinnable/advertising angle (google style toolbar), but advertising has the greatest budgets... I'll keep trying though

*bump*

This was discussed at last Tuesday's UI Triage - LL are going to make Groups and Friends "tear-offable". I'm waiting to see what this will look like - hopefully if they can be torn off seperately, and you can also get to them via keyboard short cuts this should be OK.

We'll see if this makes the next viewer update - if not, and if the interest is there (or if LL makes a hash of it!), I'll roll my update into the next viewer.

Matthew

That would be the best option if it stays that way such as the history window. What makes me wander though is if you currently do not have any active IM or chat sessions tabbed, what will the communication window look like if everything is snipped off? it may be a solid gray surface. I also wander how their going to work on separating the group and friend lists since they are tabbed vertically.

It does! Actually making the Friends/Group window tear-offable (there must be a better word!) is actually very simple - a case of adding something like canTearOff=true in the appropriate XML skin file. However, as you spotted with no IMs, the commmunication window looks quite odd!

Actually, it isn't quite that simple - the windows don't quite behalf themselves (e.g. closing the communication window in its completely empty state causes problems) so its not something I'd recommend for real use without the underlying code changes but its certainly usable enough to get a rough feel for it!

That was in fact my first thought of how to address this issue but given the issue of having to handle the empty communicator window, I decided having the menu options open a new group/friends window was an easier option - and not too different from the original IM window (which has a combined group/friends tab for when you have no IMs).

As regards bringing the Friends button back to the bottom button bar - although I'd prefer that back, my view is that I can live with the short cut key if LL is adamant on not returning that.

I get a vague impression that the communicate window is someone's (someones' ?) pet project and they've got too personally attached to it - hence the reluctance to change direction on this - but I could be wrong.

Matthew