If you're a Mac user, you know you've got access to a whole slew of first-class applications. That is, apps that follow the user-interface style guidelines for the Mac. Painstakingly developed and tested over time, the guidelines ensure consistent layouts of menus, options and hotkeys, so that you don't spend your time struggling to work out how to do the familiar, when you … [Read more...] about Does a cross-platform interface make Second Life a second-class application?
linden lab
The growing secrecy
Browsing back over some previous stories we've run, it reinforced to me again just how more secretive Linden Lab have become in the past year or so. There's a growing list of communication mechanisms that have gone by the wayside: 1. The monthly population metrics are no longer supplied in anywhere near the detail they used to. We used to report monthly on the number of … [Read more...] about The growing secrecy
Second Life immaturity – bell curve bungling.
Second Life is going through a troubling phase. It has entered young adulthood, but is still acting like a teenager - occasionally like a teething two-year-old in a tantrum. Unfortunately, Linden Lab has a very different view about where the Second Life product stands with regards to its consumers: they believe that they are providing a frontier product to the disorganized … [Read more...] about Second Life immaturity – bell curve bungling.
Beware the bling in Second Life
Linden Lab's Pastrami Linden has flagged a new feature in the current Release Candidate viewer. The 'Avatar Rendering Cost' option will show a number that equates to the cumulative graphics generation impact of that avatar - the more non-standard avatar features you've added the higher the number. It's a useful tool to determine what may be behind some of the lag experienced … [Read more...] about Beware the bling in Second Life
And they wonder why people leave Second Life
I understand that the logistics of running the Second Life grid must be one hell of a task. That said, the announcement by Linden Lab that in peak usage times they'll be disabling some of the in-world services to cope seems farcical to me. It's the equivalent of shutting off the lights on a passenger airliner to maximise power for take-off, except in this case the lights are … [Read more...] about And they wonder why people leave Second Life