New Viewer, New Problems

I know the Linden’s do their best to make our Second Life ™ experience a trouble free one and the inevitable new viewer updates are supposed to make corrections to the problems that exist. If that’s all it was, it would be fine.

A new viewer does help with some of the issues and for the most part, I welcome new viewers and the relief from annoyances. However, I fail to understand why the Lindens feel it is necessary to change things with each upgrade that do not need to be changed and did not have any problems. It seems with every viewer upgrade, a few things we are used to and were working fine get changed and problems arise.

With the latest viewer upgrade there are the usual unnecessary changes.

The first change I noticed was with camera controls. Okay, they were not perfect before, a bit jittery, but I got used to them and could maneuver fairly well. They changed them. Now the camera controls are extremely sensitive, a slight touch and they move far more than you wanted them to. As well, they don’t’ stop immediately. When you let go of the control, it keeps moving and slowing down. Kind of like a train stopping. You end up going well past the point you wanted and then toggle back only to miss your point again. It’s extremely frustrating. I was taking photos of clothing yesterday and what would normally be a ten minute job took me well over an hour. Ouch!

The second change is the location of your friend’s. It used to be that when you clicked on communicate, your friend list would come up as a tab. Now that is gone and the only way you can see your friend list is to bring up groups to find a friend’s tab. I’m not sure what was wrong with the old location.

Replacing friends on your chat screen is a tab for gestures. Why we need gesture here I’m not so certain. I have never found the need to have my gesture list within my chat screen, but maybe I’m missing something. I found the gestures located on your bottom tool bar to be efficient.

As far as fixing things, I never noticed a thing. It’s not like I log on and go, “Wow they fixed that” or “They made that better”. No, after a viewer update, even though I read the release notes, I notice no improvement. Makes me wonder what they are thinking.

To top it off, it never fails, new viewer and a whole slew of problems for a while. You can count on it. This time, failed logins, unable to log in for hours, and when I did log in, I was resorted to a ball of gas. Yep, I had no body or face, just a ball of gas. Ecch.

Lindens, please please don’t fix things. Leave them broken

Well I’ve only notice those things, but it’s early yet.

Ciao for now

Jenny