Aquarius Paravane

Thanks Terrence. It's good to see that educators of the 13-15 age group will be able to continue their programs.

F makes you fly, or land if you are already flying. You step into the air and just hover until you move with your choice of WASD or arrow keys. This is often very convenient compared to using Page Up to fly, as that tends to make you overshoot, and have to fly down again, possibly landing accidentally and having to start over. If you always use arrow keys and rarely use mouselook, it's worth pointing out that WASD is better for mouselook if you are using the mouse with your right hand. Mouselook is sometimes a better way of getting around in confined spaces.

Bryce 7 (free) and Bryce 7 Pro (under $100) aren't on the Collada page either, but both claim to do Collada import and export, see the bottom of this page: http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/bryce7/comparison?_m=d And there are great tutorials from Robin Wood (Robin Sojourner in SL) http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/BryceTuts/BryceTutSet.html Building with prims in SL was simple after Bryce, but I don't think Bryce would be too foreign for an SL prim builder. However Bryce does boolean operations and hierarchical linking, both currently not possible with prims.

@Jack - what about people who can't differentiate the colors you choose ?

@Zorin - not quite: the saddest thing is gambling the users we have for the users we don't have. If the goal is growth of user numbers to Facebook levels, then why not do as Facebook does and allow people to be anonymous. When I'm out at the RL mall, the strangers I meet can't right click on me and find out everything about me. When I do business with somebody in a store, they see my credit card and can greet me by name if they want. If I meet my friend at the mall, my friend knows more about me and can ask how I'm doing.

Thanks for the post Q. A great example is mini-map rotation. Everyone has a personal preference for this - north up or avatar nose direction up. That preference is deeply rooted in our own perceptual systems, to the point where a nose up person may think nobody could possibly use north up and vice versa. I started out in SL as a north up person, and was continually infuriated at having to turn off mini map rotation every time I installed a new viewer or had to discard preferences. Then I discovered that during boat racing, you have to see the boats that are behind you in order to avoid turning across their path. This is easily done with the minimap rotating, and not so easily done with north up: Same user, new use case = new preference.Meanwhile the rotation control migrated around the user interface. However, the further it is from the point of use, the less likely it is to be found and used. It's now (V2 at least) accessible from a right mouse click in the mini map. Now I can set it dynamically according to what I'm doing - It's no longer a preference, it's a useful tool. Put control at point of use = less interaction burden + more discoverable = more likely to be used.Re complaints about screen real estate - we're going to have dockable tabs soon, let's hope this solves that issue. But that leaves the people who declare that the UI is unusable or worse, and the only reason they can give is that it's dark. Could we please just have an original colors skin option, so we can separate the structural issues from the cosmetics.