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Since the Phoenix products are being streamlined out; I have been using the sl viewer. I have found it user friendly, pc friendly, and I have little to no lag/crash issues. These most recent updates (as of Feb.28th) cause me to be unstable, log me out in 10 seconds or less. If i am able to stay on, my inventory doesn't download, I crash on teleport, and my lag is much heavier.

I contacted support at one point, they told me to uninstall, reinstall, clear app data and restart pc. I have done this and it held ok for a few days. To my misfortune it is doing it again. I did the above steps again. This time cleaning out my entire pc, disk defrag, and ran all my anti virus. The problem still exists. I prefer the sl viewer now to any other, and wish these problems could be cleared up. Until then, I am forced to use singularity (which is not my viewer of choice) so I may maintain my second life.

I am utterly confused at how these issues that I didn't have are now serious problems for me. I have also watched many log in/log out issues and heard various complaints from other people. I do not know for certain what viewer they are on though. I do hope this gets better soon as I really like the sl viewer now.

 

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tabbed 1.JPG

 

tabbed 2.JPG

 


Blackbird Latte wrote:

Perrie I've added an entry that is rather long winded, but attempts to explain why these problems are so significant to end users and ultimately LL.

 

?

 

 

I did read your comments there earlier and am in accord with much of what you say.

Trying to get this broader attention in this Forum, I started a separate discussion in the GD section:

Chewing On CHUI (pops).

I am not aware if CHUI is being discussed over in SLU or elsewhere, I rarely go there. 


The most recent comments that I added to the JIRA are these which I posted with the screen shots above.  This was in reply to Grumpity ProductEngine requesting more clarification on my first post in the JIRA.  Personally speaking I think the number one complaint once this goes live is going to be the removal of the chat bar for local chat.  I do know that is my number one complaint.  For my full comments about tabbed browsing, please see the JIRA:

 

"First off, In the CHUI window, if there are NO conversations present, the Resident picker tab is GREYED OUT. This means I have to go down to the people tab, select someone or a group and start a conversation with them in order to make the resident picker active. This is unnecessary added steps. Secondly, once the Resident picker is open, If I go to friends, It does not tell me which friends are On Line. Friends On Line needed to at least be highlighted if not moved to the top. I should not be forced to go to another window. This is a huge oversight.

Regarding the tabbed browsing, see the two attached screen shots, Tabbed 1 & 2. I don't have to open a separate window to see my friends or my groups. A third tab could be added for people nearby.

Bottom line is you are making us do more work and open more windows needlessly to get from point A to point B.

Lastly, I want to comment once more on the removal of the chat bar. Many, if not all of us use Command Line to navigate through Second Life. If I want to go home, I simply type shift/ctrl/h, etc, etc. Also many people use gestures which are activated by a command line. Having to open up the chat window for what is currently a very simple thing now adds more work again. This does not make life simpler for us, it makes it harder.

See it big is good, but keep it simple is better."  :)

 

eta: shpelling and grammar

 

 

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First off, In the CHUI window, if there are NO conversations present, the Resident picker tab is GREYED OUT. This means I have to go down to the people tab, select someone or a group and start a conversation with them in order to make the resident picker active. This is unnecessary added steps. 

Perrie, I'm not sure I understand. There is that "+" button on the left side of the window which brings up the Resident picker to start a new conversation; I don't know of circumstances where it gets greyed-out. That's distinct from the "+(figure)" button on the right side, which would add a resident to an ongoing IM session (and will be greyed-out for Nearby chat, for obvious reasons). Could it be that you were hoping to use the latter button to achieve the effect of the former? Or am I missing it?

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Qie Niangao wrote:


First off, In the CHUI window, if there are NO conversations present, the Resident picker tab is GREYED OUT. This means I have to go down to the people tab, select someone or a group and start a conversation with them in order to make the resident picker active. This is unnecessary added steps. 

Perrie, I'm not sure I understand. There is that "+" button on the
left
side of the window which brings up the Resident picker to start a new conversation; I don't know of circumstances where it gets greyed-out. That's distinct from the "+(figure)" button on the
right
side, which would add a resident to an ongoing IM session (and will be greyed-out for Nearby chat, for obvious reasons). Could it be that you were hoping to use the latter button to achieve the effect of the former? Or am I missing it?

Yes, I see that now.  Put that in part to the learning curve. The +(figure) on the right side is for adding someone to a current conversation, a different function from the left.  Regardless, friends on line need to be highlighted in the window that opens from that function.

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Grumpity Engineer has replied to some of the comments left in CHUI Observations in the JIRA.

This was my response to him:

Thank you for your comments Grumpity.

The point here we are making is that this UI does not really take into account what is important to the majority of us when we open the Chat window. The first and most important thing I want to see is my friends On Line. Secondarily groups. This should be up front and center as in the old UI. Everything else is peripheral to that. The current UI puts on the periphery what really are the most important things to the majority of residents, and honestly, that is backwards thinking.

I also want to clarify my comment about the Chat Bar and command line. I know command line is not dependent on the chat bar. What I was referring to was channel communications. Many scripted objects use this. My Fire place in my home: I type 'fire on' or 'fire off' My security system. I show and hide attachments with it. To have to open the entire Chat window to enter a channel command is just plain silly. And it is just as needless as when all I want to do is communicate in Open Chat. So please, at least as an option, bring back the Chat Bar. Pretty Please.

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Well that just explains why so many of us are reluctant to use Jira.  I've seen this before.  The title was appropriate yet he claimed he couldn't understand or deal with the issues grouped together.

 

They don't seem to care if their work helps the company they work for or costs it serious losses.  Support said to file a Jira.  You filed a Jira, we put our concerns there, and the response is that they don't understand, or can't use the information as presented.  I thought the concepts would be simple to understand for anyone who actually uses the clients in world.

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Blackbird Latte wrote:

Well that just explains why so many of us are reluctant to use Jira.  I've seen this before.  The title was appropriate yet he claimed he couldn't understand or deal with the issues grouped together.

 

They don't seem to care if their work helps the company they work for or costs it serious losses.  Support said to file a Jira.  You filed a Jira, we put our concerns there, and the response is that they don't understand, or can't use the information as presented.  I thought the concepts would be simple to understand for anyone who actually uses the clients in world.

I'm kind of "iffy" on this.  I can see him not wanting the thread to start wandering all over the place.

What I am trying to do there is show how as far as 'work flow' goes, it is poorly designed, that is they've put on the periphery what should be front and center.

It's like they had all these little features they wanted to tie in and just attached them to a central hub with out considering what we needed the vast majority of the time.  There are too many detours getting from here to there.

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Perrie Juran wrote:

What I am trying to do there is show how as far as 'work flow' goes, it is poorly designed, that is they've put on the periphery what should be front and center.

It's like they had all these little features they wanted to tie in and just attached them to a central hub with out considering what we needed the vast majority of the time.  There are too many detours getting from here to there.

It's all a matter of what you're used to. Personally I've never used a V1 interface viewer for everyday use and the few times I have I found the concept of the contact list being included with (and therefore hidden under) the chat to be breathtakingly idiotic. I often hear see my friends who use V1 interfaces miss people being online, send IM's to the wrong person and say things in local chat that they meant for an IM.  I lead a quite chat-intensive Second LIfe and find the Viewer 2/3 chat flow to work just fine.

I'm not saying it's bad that you prefer the V1 chat flow, however, consider this: the people who find V1 chat flow superior almost certainly don't use Viewer 3, so I don't see who would be served by changing back to the old chat flow in a viewer largely used by people who don't use it.

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:


Perrie Juran wrote:

What I am trying to do there is show how as far as 'work flow' goes, it is poorly designed, that is they've put on the periphery what should be front and center.

It's like they had all these little features they wanted to tie in and just attached them to a central hub with out considering what we needed the vast majority of the time.  There are too many detours getting from here to there.

It's all a matter of what you're used to. Personally I've never used a V1 interface viewer for everyday use and the few times I have I found the concept of the contact list being included with (and therefore hidden under) the chat to be breathtakingly idiotic. I often hear see my friends who use V1 interfaces miss people being online, send IM's to the wrong person and say things in local chat that they meant for an IM.  I lead a quite chat-intensive Second LIfe and find the Viewer 2/3 chat flow to work just fine.

I'm not saying it's bad that you prefer the V1 chat flow, however, consider this: the people who find V1 chat flow superior almost certainly don't use Viewer 3, so I don't see who would be served by changing back to the old chat flow in a viewer largely used by people who don't use it.

I have used and still use different viewers and can adapt.  Nor can I nor would I speak for everyone's preferences.  But based on what I am hearing and reading, I don't think I am in a minority with my thoughts.  The GUI as it currently exists in CHUI ignores the basic work flow most residents use and it puts on the periphery what should be primary.

As far as people who don't use Viewer 3, there are two main reasons they don't. For some it is because V3 doesn't run well on their computers.  But the other and what I believe is the primary reason for using TPV's with V1 design is because the GUI sucks in V3.  Clean up the GUI in V3 and a lot more people would use it.

I don't push TPV's.  Occasionally I recommend friends try them when they are having trouble with the Official Viewer.  The constant response I hear from those who do is, OMG, this has really made my SL Life easier/better.  So it is not just a matter of familiarity.

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I gave the CHUI Beta a spin, and it is terrific!

 

Some observations:

  • Vertical IM tabs: Very problematic, because if you want to see whose tab is blinking and who you're conversing with, you must have the left pane expanded - and it wastes an enormous amount of screen space. Horizontal tabs with just a name instead of an icon would work nicely, thank you.
  • Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-H does not work consistently when compared to all other pop-up window shortcuts. Expected behaviour in my mind should be that Ctrl-H opens the Conversations window, and then closes it on second use. As it is now, subsequent presses of the shortcut cycle through the chat tabs. This is confusing and redundant - we already have Alt-Left/Right arrow for that.
  • Chat window widgets: The Close widget is the leftmost widget in IM tabs. This is unintuitive, as we have all been conditioned to find the Close widget at top right. I suspect that the issue behind this is that the Nearby chat tab doesn't get a Close widget, so in an attempt to not have moving widgets it was placed on the left. Please try to find another way - for example, a simple disabled widget in Nearby chat.

...and that's all, pretty much. Great work so far LL!

 

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OK -- tried it and was about ready to throw the machine out the window.  I know LL is ambitious and houses some considerable talent, but part of a successful firm is to poll the TPV and dev groups as to see what the general populace is pushing for regarding chat organization.


Also, it's time to scrap the monolithic chat design.  Make it MODULAR.  If LL had the smarts, they'd have a blog page where people could see screeenshots of widgets used for various chatting systems.  All you do is look through the list, click on the type of chat interface you want, and *poof* it installs.  That way you can have community developed chat modules based on V1, V2, V3, and creative designs.

 

CHUI was a disaster -- it's slow, clunky, only works for people with massive displays, and requires way too many clicks.  It's time to make V1 the standard and then supply plug-ins people can use as to customize the chat in their viewer.

 

As for the general viewer, it's time to scrap it and restart as to make a unified renderer that works better with mesh and other kinds of data.  Patching header files and adding bindings is killing the codebase.

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The JIRA a few pages back has been closed by Alexis Linden claiming that the feedback was constructive, but the "goalposts keep moving".  All the feedback said to knock the goalpost over and never show us this pile of junk again.

 

I've been through version 1, 2, and 3.  I was probably one of the few supporters of V2 and thought it was refreashing in concept, even though they went and outsourced it to folks who obviously never used SL and missed a lot of BASIC and VITAL buttons. 


Second life is a virtual world.  I pay membership and tier to be in a virtual world.  Not for a 1995 IRC interface, which isn't fair and in 1995 IRC had the foresight not to combine every channel into one box.  I'd agree that this is going to push longtime users onto a Third Party Viewer.

At SXSW(South by Southwest) I spoke with Inworldz.  I didn't see Second Life having a booth however.  I start to wonder, I thought I paid a lot of money into tier to support the innovation of Second Life, but are we all really just wasting money now?

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All the tech pundits have been saying of SXSW, "nobody goes there anymore -- it's too crowded." I can think of no more compelling case for that.

Incidentally, as I mentioned over in the General forum thread, there's a new build that fixes CHUIBUG-99, the one where focus on a torn-off chat window wipes the CHUI hub window. I know other folks have different issues with CHUI (I have a few other minor annoyances myself) but that was by far the biggest problem for me.

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Incidentally, if anyone wants to see if things have been fixed/changed in the latest CHUI build, these links always point to the latest build I believe:

Windows: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/viewer-chui/arch/CYGWIN/quicklink.html

Mac: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/viewer-chui/arch/Darwin/quicklink.html

Linux: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/viewer-chui/arch/Linux/quicklink.html

Caveat: These builds may not always be stable :)

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I've just tried this new chat thing.. I never liked the old new chat thing either, but I think this CHUI is an improvement.

I guess I'm old-school with my chat preferences. I want the chat-entry bar at the bottom.. a single bar. I want <ctrl-h> to toggle a streamlined window with local (nearby) chat. I want <ctrl-t> to toggle a pop-up stream-lined window with tabbed non-local chats (IMs/groups). I can get used to the vertical tabs if the local/nearby tab is removed when torn off (and if they mouse-wheel scroll). Any other avatar/group-related options, I can get with a brief visit to the people window. Now to complain about wasted space...

 

On torn-off local chat, the entire header is wasted space. We're going to set it the way we like and leave it that way. For me, it's the compact view with show times enabled. I'll never need the options button again. Put it in the chat prefs screen where it belongs. It's a set-once option.

The Add person and Call person buttons are functionless in local chat, more wasted space. The "expand participant list" button is the same. I collapse the list because, A) I have the chat display names in the chat, B) I can right-click the names for more options, and C) if I really need options from someone nearby who hasn't chatted, I can, i)right-click their avatar or ii) open people nearby window and go from there. That button is wasted space. Finally, the re-attach to main window button is wasted space. I tore it off because I want it off, at the bottom of the screen where it belongs. I have no intention of ever re-attaching it.

On the IMs window, those buttons aren't required either. The option to add a person to the conversation should appear when I right-click the avatar/group name (right above where it offers the option to "close conversation). I can already right-click to call that person. The "X" close button should be inside the actual chat container - just above the vertical scroll bar. No need for expand/contract, everyone will keep it one way or the other. Tear-off is the only useful button there, but could move to a right-click or onto the scroll bar like the "X".

Also, I don't like that I can't <ctrl-t> to open only IMs/Groups without it also opening the local chat window which I've torn off. Instead, I have to hit <ctrl-t-h-h> in order to open IMs, then close local to get just the IMs. Maybe that's a bug to be fixed in the next beta version along with the blank IM window when torn-off local has focus.

 

Finally (this got long-winded). Why in the world does everything minimize to the upper-left? It's frustrating when I minimize scripts and they get hidden below the CHUI monster. Can I get an option to set a preferred minimize-to corner. And while you're at it, an option to increase the size of the monospace script font for those of us with larger screens or higher resolutions. I know, JIRA and I can hack a file to edit the monospace size (can we still do that?).  Until last month, I was using Firestorm with its comfortable V1 settings (and the Pie of course). Maybe I'll visit the JIRA soon.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Single line chat (and, oddly, single line IM) seems likely to be coming to the CHUI Beta soon (it's just hit the dev compile).  There are also a few other things tidying up some stuff in the GUI.  Many of these are good, but I do feel some opportunities to reduce the overall size for smaller screens have been missed.  I hope you will give it a try and let the CHUI team know what you like and what you don't.

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It's a 3 minute drive and I got to see a good life-sized mock-up of a new space telescope. For free.


I'd say I wish SL as boozing it up instead of working on this failure, but they have had to been boozing to come up with it. 

 

I would've replied earlier, but I downgraded my viewer and got to actually use my virtual world.  Redoing a stretch of sim and participating in a hunt would've been impossible with CHUI, plus, I got to see what groups where talking or issuing notices without having to click through 5 links versus 0.

I have to get it all finished before they force this unusuablely bad piece of software on me until I find somewhere else.

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Yes, the new Beta has single-line chat, and it seems to work pretty much as one would expect... with a few caveats.

I realize now that the ability to drag it around the screen wherever I want it--which I like--comes with the penalty of having floater window decorations (the title bar with "?", "_", and "X" controls), which nearly double its height. I'm not sure why these windows ("Conversations", "Nearby chat", and torn-off IM floaters) need so much vertical padding between the titlebar and the content, especially, and between content blocks and the bottom of the window. I've griped about that before, but it's particularly annoying for that single-line floater. (This in contrast to the Mini-Map, for example, which is another floater that's left up on the screen a lot, and is appropriately unpadded.) I guess the CHUI windows look nicer individually with the padding, but in the context of the overall UI, it makes them less appealing as well as less functional.

There also may be a glitch in window repositioning when docking torn-off floaters. At one point, it slid the re-docked Conversations window to the left of the screen edge where I'd parked it, but I'm not able to reproduce the problem now.

I'm not entirely happy with the fact that closing the Conversations window also closes all torn-off chat/IM windows. I can live with it by always keeping the Conversations window shrunk down to just the label tiles. But there's something inconsistent or at least non-intuitive in that behavior because it's possible to have a stand-alone local chat bar (which is good) if you open it by just pressing the Enter key, but once the Conversations window has been opened, closing that makes the chatbar close, too.

Another oddity. Tear off Nearby chat, shrink it to a single line chatbar. Close it. (I'm not thrilled that closing the chatbar seems to open the Conversations window, docking Nearby chat, but that's not the bug.) Now Control-H for chat history: you get just the single line chatbar on top of a big blank area, as if the window were sized for history, but none is shown. Shrinking it down to single-line and back again makes the history appear as expected.

(I suppose this should go in the jira, but we've been slapped both for adding too many separate jira items and for adding too much to existing jira items, and so I'm unmotivated at the moment.)

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Qie Niangao wrote:

 

(I suppose this should go in the jira, but we've been slapped both for adding too many separate jira items and for adding too much to existing jira items, and so I'm
 at the moment.)

I got slapped too for something I said.  I do hope to give the latest beta a test drive again this week. 

I am going to toss the results of this survey at them as food for thought:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/What-Size-Computer-Monitor-Do-You-Use/m-p/1942489#M100014

 

More and more we get the impression thet too many of the Devs don't have Second Lives.  I can see no other logical reason for some things not being thought through better.  Just the fact we had to speak up so loudly about the chat bar is a good indicator.  It would be pretty durn hard to miss the importance of it otherwise.  But that is just my two cents.

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Perrie Juran wrote:


Qie Niangao wrote:

 

(I suppose this should go in the jira, but we've been slapped both for adding too many separate jira items and for adding too much to existing jira items, and so I'm
 at the moment.)

I got slapped too for something I said. 

yes I saw that

no bawwing on the JIRA q; (: is unseemly these days. apparently

you can baw on here the forums tho.  as much as we want (:

I been bawwing heaps lately. is working! I get 2 things I want off them lindens already

I need baw more often I think. jejjejee (:

 

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It's always best to keep comments on the JIRA factual i.e. I have pointed out a bug when entering lots of characters in single line chat (it's a good one), and on here I can say that I am not surprised as the way they have implemented single line chat using the xml is a bit messy. :-)

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