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We’re happy to announce a new First Look for SLim, a new voice and text instant messaging client.

SLim’s technology is provided by Vivox (www.vivox.com) and developed in partnership with Linden Lab to work with the Second Life viewer.  SLim enables Second Life Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with member of their Second Life friends list….whether they are logged into the virtual world or offline. While the Second Life viewer will still serve as the primary inworld communication engine, SLim is capable of running on most computers, and offers users a voice-enabled instant messaging client that extends the value of the Second Life Grid beyond the virtual world.

SLim significantly lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that Second Life Residents will always be able to connect to friends, regardless of location or broadband connection. SLim is also a compelling tool for the Second Life Grid enterprise offering, which will enable employees to communicate and collaborate with colleagues meeting inworld without having the Second Life application running.

SLim’s features include:

• Access to your Second Life friends list with real-time “presence” status updates
• Seamless migration from a text conversation into a voice call
• Ability to leave voice mails for offline friends

Learn more about SLim in our Knowledge Base article

Because this is a First Look, there are a few known but not serious issues with this release.  We hope you’ll report any new ones to this PJIRA.

We’re happy to see how voice has taken off in Second Life and to give Second Life Residents alternatives in how they choose to communicate with other. Voice concurrency rates are about 50% of our total inworld concurrency:  for example, when total inworld concurrency on Sunday is 70,000 Residents, the total number of concurrent voice speakers is 35,000. Vivox, our partner in SL Voice, recently  added more voice servers to keep up with demand.

We hope that SLim will be yet another bridge between inworld and out-of-world and other online activities.

As your login splash screen may have already told you, an optional viewer upgrade is available today… Announcing the Second Life 1.20 Viewer! It features improved reliability and a more flexible UI architecture so you can select the color of the User Interface. It also brings several improved features and many important bug fixes. Download it here! For those of you who’d like more detail on what’s in the new viewer, please read on.

This 1.20.15 version has finished fifteen weeks in a Release Candidate cycle of testing (with thousands of your reports & logs volunteered to our engineers). With more than 35 crash fixes in this version, you should experience better stability than the previous version 1.19.1. From all crash metrics collected to this point, we have observed an approximate 20% improvement in total crash rate in this viewer across all types of hardware.

One new feature is the ability to change the color theme (or “skinning”) of the User Interface. To do this, use CTRL+P to go to Preferences > Skins tab and select one of the options! The new Silver skin provides a refreshed color scheme for the UI and icons. This is the culmination of Project Dazzle, which was refined with residents in previous First Look and the Release Candidate cycle. Based on YOUR FEEDBACK, this new color scheme is optional in the final viewer: Second Life will install with the classic appearance until you choose to change it.

Finally, this viewer delivers some anticipated bug fixes as reported by you, our Residents… and a number of Open Source contributions. Here’s only a few of these from all which we are proud to include:

• Fixed: VWR-2778: System skirt textures turn invisible on wearing
• Fixed: VWR-2404: Lossless texture compression on small textures is not lossless
• Fixed: VWR-2633/VWR-6889: Unable to interact with some Groups when role has no allowed abilities
• Fixed: VWR-6800: Eliminate memory leaks in llcharacter/llmotioncontroller code
• Fixed: VWR-4860: WindLight: Planar texturing renders incorrectly in version 1.19
• Fixed: VWR-4580: Property lines are visible through avatar, objects and through ground
• Fixed: VWR-1735: Directly interacting with a muted resident should unmute them
• Fixed: VWR-6350: Word “Flycam” appears in Flycam Mode and does not disappear with UI
• … and 104 more bugs as listed in the complete Release Notes!

There are plenty of small changes and improvements to explore — and you can find out where you can update your graphics card drivers (as we always recommend) — starting with this page on the Second Life Wiki:

» The 1.20 Welcome page «

Note: This viewer upgrade is OPTIONAL: You may still log in to Second Life with older viewers 1.19.0 and version 1.19.1.

Back in early May, we blogged to let you know that we were seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Mac OS X 10.3, “Panther,” which was first released by Apple back in 2003.

As we wrote then, our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/4 of 1 percent of all of you, the entire base of Residents, are still using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.3 when logging into Second Life.

The vast majority of responses from you confirmed that you agree, it makes sense to free up the Linden engineers from working to support an operating system used by so few Residents, and instead we should let them move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group.

We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now, a little over two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.

What does it mean to “stop support”? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on OS 10.3.9.

What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Panther, OS 10.3.9, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time.

Exactly how long we can’t guarantee, because Linden engineers will no longer be testing to make sure that new releases will work with Panther (OS 10.3.) So, eventually, there may be a time when some new element will interfere significantly enough to result in folks who will not be able to log in with OS 10.3 on their hardware. At that time such folks would need to upgrade their OS in order to do so.

What if you plan to keep using OS 10.3? We will continue to support the 1.19.4 viewer, which does work with Panther, (OS 10.3.9), and we will do our best to give reasonable notice before we stop supporting 1.19.4. So to be clear, stick with that viewer if you don’t plan to upgrade from Panther. Residents still using OS 10.3 will be able to log in to SL with Panther, 10.3.9, using the 1.19.4 viewer, they will just not be able to update to new Second Life versions, as new versions of the viewer which will continue to be released with improved stability and additional features will not support OS 10.3.

Please be careful to note, as we blogged yesterday, that the most recent optional Release Candidate will not run on a PowerPC running OS 10.3.9:

IMPORTANT: Known Issues with RC14

• It is a Known Issue that this Release Candidate will not run successfully on a Mac PowerPC that has the operating system OS X 10.3.9. It will only run on PPC hardware if you have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher.
• The current viewer, version 1.19.1, still supports the Mac PowerPC that is running Mac OS X 10.3.9.

At this time we’re not considering dropping any other operating system.

Our general approach to supporting older releases of operating systems on any platform is to fully support the current and most recent OS for each platform. For example, we will actively support both Vista and Windows XP until such time as Vista is replaced with Microsoft’s next major operating system release. Similarly, we all support the most recent releases of Mac OS 10.5 and 10.4. Again, in all cases, we will attempt to provide at least 60 days notice prior to dropping formal support for any operating system, as we did in this case.

I’ll note that I personally run Second Life on one of two MacBook Pro laptops, one running Tiger (OS 10.4,) and one running Leopard (OS 10.5.4.)

[To briefly recap the history of the last five years of Mac OS: Panther, OS 10.3, was first released in October 2003, and updated to 10.3.9 in 2005. Apple has followed Panther with two more recent versions of the Apple OS, “Tiger” (OS 10.4,) released in April 2005 and “Leopard,” (OS 10.5.4,) released in October 2007 and most recently updated in June 2008.]