New Viewer (finally) brings HTML-on-a-Prim

Second Life Viewer 2 Beta is out and it brings advanced media capabilites!
Full html on a prim face will make lifes of presenters and educators a lot easier. No more uploading umpteen slides, just do it off the web.
Toying around a little I just successfully tested video-streaming from my Android handset via UStream and it arrived fine and safely inside SL on the face of a prim.
Webpages can be set interactive or not, and a few more settings, depending on the builder's intentions.
I guess artists around the grid will pick up the new opportunities shortly and find a million ways to make SL an even richer experience.

Next SL Viewer Release to bring major progress

Besides facilitating the new adult content policy LL announced recently (which is also the reason this release will be out later than anticipated) the next release of the official client will incorporate features like shadows, flexi prims and bulk permission editing!

Boy Lane, developer of the alternative Cool Viewer, divulged on the forums along with posting a link to his pre-alpha Shadow Viewer 1.23 release:

"... It is purely meant as an early preview, perhaps to take some nice snapshots, and play around, but it is not meant for any serious work. It is something pre-alpha, it will crash. ...

Included features are:
Bulk permission editing (part of official 1.23 to come)
Enhanced building tools (part of official 1.23 to come)
Flexible Sculpties
Double click to wear attachments
Large Prims (only for Opensim grids)
Maximized Network Bandwidth
MUPose Style
Worn Inventory Tab
Teleport History
...and a number of more goodies and (hopefully) stability fixes. Too many to mention here ..."

Yummy.

Shadows over Second Life

Yesterday I finally tried out Kirsten Lee's shadow viewer SD5-R1, which I had downloaded just shortly before Kirsten decided to pull all her viewers from the public.

After installing the viewer there are a few settings to check in the advanced debug menu ... and then, if one is lucky, there are rendered shadows, and little side-effects. In my case there was a certain unnatural glow that hurt the eye, which makes this viewer not the standard choice.
But as you can see in the video above (focus on the large cocktail glass!), the shadows cast are indeed amazing.

Second Life on the road

When I found out that volleeSL - the Second Life client for mobile phones - wasn't ready in any touch-screen phone version, I was a tad disappointed, having recently upgraded to a LG Renoir.
My only consolation was that iPhone users were no better off than myself.
But then I decided to give the version for an older LG phone a try ... success! It runs, but it has to be said the navigation is harder than on my old Motorola, as it is designed for a phone with a keypad, and I have to switch the virtual keypad on the touch-screen from numbers to navigation keys every time I want to switch from moving horizontally to vertically and vice versa.

Have I mentioned yet that this is a graphic client?!

And if you know where you are you can actually make out little details on the tiny screen (even sculpties are rendered normally) ... in this video our avatar is inspecting Pinkpink's studio in the air - but fails in landing in the pink ashtray, since there's half-transparent green platforms obstructing the path ...
Visit this SLUrl to compare with "actual" view: http://slurl.com/secondlife/marsco/18/38/294

Of course volleeSL comes with it's limitations - you can't touch or right-click any objects, so inworld interactions are limited to communication. But since this is the only way to connect to SL on a mobile at all to send an IM from on the road, the ability to fly around in a graphically rendered scene is a nice add-on!