New Profiles . . .

[Conifer Dada]

With the latest viewer update the format of the profiles page has been updated. I explored this a bit and discovered that you can now write a lot more on your SL bio page.  A lot more - I tested it out with lines and lines of random letters! The same is probably true of the RL page. Also the pictures on the feed seem to be a bit bigger when you click on them to enlarge them.

Thanks to Linden Lab for this improvement 🙂

Edited August 31, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[Kadah Coba]

While I'm not keen on the new layout, its nice to see they finally did something with my legacy profile feature contrib LL asked for like 3.5 years ago. Not sure how much involvement FS has other than referring LL over to me for that request, but maybe they were, nobody ever tells me anything. lol

Andrey appears to have done most of the work bringing this this release, so thanks goes to them, and also to Vir and Alexa for doing their best to answer my questions on things nobody else had touched or looked at in many years.

It might have already been in the viewer before this release, but it looks like this branch may have brought in my old copy/paste project, also from 2019.

I kinda stop doing contribs the last couple years as there nothing seemed to be happening on these last two requested projects. The inability to access much of anything on jira anymore didn't help either. 😛

FYI, if you Lindens still want OPEN-311 / STORM-2123, point me to a fix for compiling the LL viewer on Linux and I'll remake the thing from scratch after a C++ refresher. I've still had no luck recovering that project repo after BitBucket wiped all hg repos a few years ago.

 

Edit: A few things I've noticed playing around with this release.

Documentation needs to be updated, display names kb appears to be generic to both web profiles and pre web profile methods.

Its cool feeds was kept. I never used it myself, but it was one of the few features from web profiles I felt was a good idea.

Any reason why "interests" tab was removed? The web profile ones didn't ever seem to be used for much, and the legacy one had some useful fields that search had indexed from in the past.

Yet another profile image ratio, awesome... Web profile used native from what I remember, can understand not doing that, but everything else had always been 4:3 or close to that. These are 3px narrower than 1:1 at 157x159, so like 1:1.013~... that's a thing I guess, lol. The textures look pretty bad being so tiny and squished. Would have been nice our profile photos weren't squished thumbnails. The layout makes it look even narrower. meh

It is nice having picks back to something residents on the LL viewer might actually notice is there. Had lost track of the number of LL viewer users I had to explain what "picks" where and how to access them. Pick images are undersized to the pick panel and looks weird, ratio might also be something different from all previously used.

Ditto with classifieds. x3

Profile text fields appear to be something new not on the old API since it seems to be supporting a massive data size. I got to around 22KB before giving up, would bet the limit is the same as note cards (65KB I think). I'm gonna guess changes saved on the new profiles are incompatible with actual legacy profiles.

Completely unrelated, but the text in the LL viewer is still really harsh on my eyes. DejaVu on this render does not agree with me. So glad I don't have to read anything while using it.

Edited September 2, 2022 by Kadah Coba

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 8/31/2022 at 10:11 AM, Conifer Dada said:

Thanks to Linden Lab for this improvement

This is not an improvement, but the late revert of a bad move, the move that happened when they attempted to shove Web profiles down everyone's throat despite all the objections TPV developers (and mine among them) and SL users raised. Thankfully, they did not remove the related UDP messages (and are actually today reusing them (*)) and the TPVs could keep the v1-style profiles all this time.

It was one of the same categories of ”improvements” that I predicted would be a total failure (another such ”improvement” was the removal of family names in avatar names ”to make it easier for new users to fill up the registering form” sic !). There have been many more, and soon you will see the attempt to remove the direct rendering mode (that will ruin the frame rates for all but powerful PC users)... 😞

(*) Amusingly, and while backporting the new ”AgentProfile” capability support to the Cool VL Viewer, I noticed that, in fact, the said capability is never used by LL's profile viewer code: line 119 of indra/newview/llavatarpropertiesprocessor.cpp reads std::string cap; instead of what should be std::string cap = gAgent.getRegionCapability(”AgentProfile”); so the ”cap” url is always empty and a fallback is always done to the UDP methods...

10 hours ago, Kadah Coba said:

Any reason why ”interests” tab was removed? The web profile ones didn't ever seem to be used for much, and the legacy one had some useful fields that search had indexed from in the past.

+1

I, too, think the removal of the Interests tab in LL's new viewer (not from mine !) is a bad move ( ”bad move” is a TM by LL, since they are pretty much the inventor of bad moves).

As a ”foreign” user, I find the ”Languages” field especially useful, but the Skills and Interests fields are quite interesting as well and I do not see why they got removed from the UI !

10 hours ago, Kadah Coba said:

Yet another profile image ratio, awesome... Web profile used native from what I remember, can understand not doing that, but everything else had always been 4:3 or close to that. These are 3px narrower than 1:1 at 157x159, so like 1:1.013~... that's a thing I guess, lol. The textures look pretty bad being so tiny and squished. Would have been nice our profile photos weren't squished thumbnails. The layout makes it look even narrower. meh

+1

I really wish LL would, once and for all, go back to the 4:3 ratio that existed in v1 profiles, and keep that same ratio everywhere in all the places (i.e. on their web sites included) where profile pictures are displayed !

Edited September 2, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Bree Giffen]

On 8/31/2022 at 1:11 AM, Conifer Dada said:

With the latest viewer update the format of the profiles page has been updated. I explored this a bit and discovered that you can now write a lot more on your SL bio page.  A lot more - I tested it out with lines and lines of random letters! The same is probably true of the RL page. Also the pictures on the feed seem to be a bit bigger when you click on them to enlarge them.

Thanks to Linden Lab for this improvement 🙂

I think the new profile layout looks better. Profile pic is larger. Tabs to other parts of profile are bigger and at the top. Now the bio is a huge blank space just waiting to be filled with Drama. 

No one really talks about the parcel lines in the mini-map! It lets me know that my rental is a really tiny parcel of land.

[MoiraKathleen]

I can't comment on any of the technical stuff or the decision-making capabilities of LL, but as an average user who has been using the SL viewer again since the performance viewer version was released, I like the look of the new profiles.  I feel it's definitely an improvement over the web version of the profile that had been used in the SL viewer, and in my opinion, an improvement over the legacy profiles in the third-party viewers. 

[missyrideout]

Is it a new web profile or are the changes to the legacy profile? One profile that will eventually be in TPV or just another aspect ratio?

Edited September 2, 2022 by missyrideout

[Kadah Coba]

4 hours ago, missyrideout said:

Is it a new web profile or are the changes to the legacy profile? One profile that will eventually be in TPV or just another aspect ratio?

I think this is targeted to be the default going forward and web profiles, other than the feed page, will get sunset officially at some point. Dev on web profile had been pretty much inactive since shortly after release.

Have not explicitly checked, but I think FS upstream has already adopted some variant of this design with the 1:1.013 ratio.

10 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

 Thankfully, they did not remove the related UDP messages (and are actually today reusing them (*)) and the TPVs could keep the v1-style profiles all this time.

You welcome on that. I documented the legacy profile API for LL at their request back then so, I'm guessing, they'd know what not to break. I have not looked in to the new code yet, but suspect the new viewer-based profiles aren't using only the legacy API since the info fields now support 65KB instead of just ~501B.

I still kinda laugh at one of the reasons that was given for the move to web-based profiles, (paraphrasing) "it's easier to get web developers than C++ devs that are familiar with a custom UI code base." My response to that then was something like "Ya know I'm right here and would do it for free right?" We sorta did loop back around to that in the end though, I gave them back a v1 profiles starting point in 6.1.1, I just didn't expect it'd take 3.5 years to ship. :p

[Ceka Cianci]

I like the new profiles they have for that viewer now..

Now to get rid of the rest of the "M" feeling  it has to it and It would be much more desirable..

Edited September 2, 2022 by Ceka Cianci

[Henri Beauchamp]

11 hours ago, Kadah Coba said:

I have not looked in to the new code yet, but suspect the new viewer-based profiles aren't using only the legacy API

They do still use it... and in fact, due to the bug I explained in my former post here, LL's current viewer does not even use the new AgentProfile capability (i.e. the new API).

Oh, and by the way, I just released the Cool VL Viewer v1.30.0.15, with (working) support for that new capability... So LL's QA team will at least be able to test the server-side part of that new API, at least... 🤣

Edited September 3, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Kadah Coba]

41 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

They do still use it... and in fact, due to the bug I explained in my former post here, LL's current viewer does not even use the new AgentProfile capability (i.e. the new API).

How are they getting 65KB support in the about fields? The legacy message was capped at 510B. I hadn't check loading of non-self profiles with long abouts, though I can see it does sync the full size to web profiles.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Kadah Coba said:

How are they getting 65KB support in the about fields? The legacy message was capped at 510B. I hadn't check loading of non-self profiles with long abouts, though I can see it does sync the full size to web profiles.

I just checked and they indeed use the capability in indra/newview/llpanelprofile.cpp, short-circuiting the code they created in viewer/indra/newview/llavatarpropertiesprocessor.cpp (which is the code with the bug), which was obviously created to split the messaging protocol related code from the profile UI code (llpanel*.cpp files)... How weird and dirty !...

Well, so they do use their new cap. At least in part...

Edited September 3, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Henry Blackwood]

On 8/31/2022 at 9:11 AM, Conifer Dada said:

With the latest viewer update the format of the profiles page has been updated. I explored this a bit and discovered that you can now write a lot more on your SL bio page.  A lot more - I tested it out with lines and lines of random letters! The same is probably true of the RL page. Also the pictures on the feed seem to be a bit bigger when you click on them to enlarge them.

Thanks to Linden Lab for this improvement 🙂

A big ‘thank you!’ from me  

[Fenix Eldritch]

I gave my copy+paste keys a workout to see what the new profile text limits appear to be. This is what I found:

2nd Life Bio: 65000 bytes
1st Life Bio: 65000 bytes
My Notes Tab: 65530 bytes
Picks Title: 254 bytes
Picks Entry: 1023 bytes
Classified Title: 30 bytes
Classified Entry: 256 bytes
Feed Posting: 1024 characters
Feed Comment: 512 characters

The feed post/comments are interesting, as pasting regular ascii as well as multi-byte unicode characters like "❤" seemed to yield the same number of characters allowed.

[Seicher Rae]

sigh. My usual thoughts to these kinds of threads:

Wait.
Wut?

The profiles have changed? They look the same to me. I think I have the new release of FS? Wait. Wut?

sigh

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, Fenix Eldritch said:

2nd Life Bio: 65000 bytes
1st Life Bio: 65000 bytes
My Notes Tab: 65530 bytes
Picks Title: 254 bytes
Picks Entry: 1023 bytes
Classified Title: 30 bytes
Classified Entry: 256 bytes

What is this in Ordinary Person speak?

[Rowan Amore]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What is this in Ordinary Person speak?

Type until you can't type anymore.

[Fenix Eldritch]

With ordinary text, usually one character equals one byte. For fancy unicode characters, the character may take up more than one byte. I'm not sure what encoding the profiles use (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc) but the bottom line is that the 2nd life, 1st life and notes sections have been given considerably more space.

[Nalates Urriah]

So... now I'll have to see if the Firestorm profiles allow use of the additional space.

IT DOES!

Now all I have to do is think of what to say...

I WILL miss being able to see the language a person speaks. I used that with nearly all the new people I meet.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Nalates Urriah

[Love Zhaoying]

So, the age of TL;DR profiles is here!

[Kadah Coba]

6 hours ago, Fenix Eldritch said:

With ordinary text, usually one character equals one byte. For fancy unicode characters, the character may take up more than one byte. I'm not sure what encoding the profiles use (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc) but the bottom line is that the 2nd life, 1st life and notes sections have been given considerably more space.

SL uses UTF-8 everywhere (I've recent tested that). So ASCII characters are 1-byte, the bulk majority of extended characters used by Latin and European based languages are 2-bytes, and, I believe, most Asian and others language characters may use between 3-bytes and 4-bytes.

While 65KB limit is a bit excessive for profile info (thats >800 lines of 80 ASCII chars per line), this change does make it more fare for Asian language profiles as they are no longer limited to around 170 chars while English only could do 510.

[animats]

59 minutes ago, Kadah Coba said:

SL uses UTF-8 everywhere (I've recent tested that)

Does it?

Try putting emoji in a notecard. Doesn't work n FS 6.5.6.

 

[Blaise Glendevon]

On 9/2/2022 at 7:13 AM, Henri Beauchamp said:

I really wish LL would, once and for all, go back to the 4:3 ratio that existed in v1 profiles, and keep that same ratio everywhere in all the places (i.e. on their web sites included) where profile pictures are displayed !

I wish LL would make it mandatory for TPV to match their ratios to the Second Life official viewer and scrape out all the cruft from V1 that seems to serve no purpose other than some people being unwilling to change.

[Blaise Glendevon]

I enjoyed web profiles and the nascent social media feel of it. Sharing screenshots directly to your profile was super fun and seeing what others were doing was as well. I'm glad its back in a functional format.

[Kadah Coba]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Does it?

Try putting emoji in a notecard. Doesn't work n FS 6.5.6.

 

Anywhere that supports unicode that is.

Though I just tired in FS 6.5.7, both unicode and emojis are working in notecards. You might be using a typeface that has poor unicode coverage, I don't use the default DejaVu as it causes migraines for me (this is also why I can be very defensive over certain UI changes and have maintained my own viewer forks since 1.2x) and instead use a custom font profile I've been using for over a decade.

[Kadah Coba]

4 hours ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

I wish LL would make it mandatory for TPV to match their ratios to the Second Life official viewer and scrape out all the cruft from V1 that seems to serve no purpose other than some people being unwilling to change.

LL is the one that has repeatedly change these ratios. Web profiles was possibly the only "correct" solution on that as it auto-cropped thumbnails to a 1:1 while the original image would maintain its aspect ratio. LL broke that in this update, even though they kept the free upload from disk part.

Re "V1 cruft": If you could tell me what in the modern LL UI triggers my migraines that would be great. Until then, I'm going to keep maintaining those at least for myself. I've already subjected myself to months of making the text rendering and various UI contrasts in FS physically compatible with people like me. I am not keel on doing that again as a few minutes of a failed test change would often result in up to several days of being incapacitated and was the main reason why it took so long to resolve without finding the distinct triggers.

This condition sucks. I have no idea what it is. I have literally had to quit lifestyle positive activities over closed source UI changes due to it.

Somebody using their own time to maintain accessibility forks of something you do not use does not detriment you.