Back again ...

Monday night I returned from a lovely vacation with excellent weather, lots of beer, wine and and fine food, courtesy of generous donators (again, thanks to everybody), but also finding a not so lovely backlog of RL work. (One of the wonders of self employment is that a vacation is more or less an time of organized procrastination, but heck I wouldn't want a different life :-).

Today however is a national holiday here in Germany, so I'm taking a little break from the backlog and was checking what's up with 3D Life this morning, so here is what I came up with:

Trademarks
One bit which comes back to my mind is the new Linden Lab® trademark policy and it happens that Barney shares some good thoughts about it on his blog. What amazes me about the Linden™s is how they constantly misjudge or ignore the effects which their actions have on people. It's like a company suffering from Asperger Syndrome. Asperger of course is an individual issue and I doubt it has ever been diagnosed on a group, but if you have a bit of time I am sure the the description of the problems in social interactions, loosely applied to LL™ and residents, may ring a few bells.

For myself I'm still unclear how to handle the use of the Linden™ trademarks, I guess I will try to avoid the terms whenever I can and will otherwise follow the rules to the letter, up to the point where it is shows how ridiculous the whole issue is. This is not because I do not accept their legal rights, because actually I do. I have two registered trademarks myself but it would never occur to me to use these against fan sites or even add on products. After all, especially with the Googlification of the internet, the biggest asset for a brand is exposure.

Anyway, Barney is certainly right that levering the enforcement of their guidelines through the TOS is baaaad idea. They already know that seizure of assets most likely will not hold up in court because the TOS shows signs of being unconscionable because of being a contract of adhesion (see here), so all it does is alienate people. The average customer of course won't go through the hassles of going to court like Bragg, but in a situation of such power imbalance users will instead try to evade the issue by either avoiding use of those terms or by following the rules rigidly or satirically, which will limit the brand exposure and/or will show how kafkaesque LL™s idea of brand usage is.

EyeCandy
The new EyeCandy viewer seems to be doing nicely (there were over 1700 downloads in April, WOW!). A few users have pointed out some quirks which I will try to fix and I'll also see if I can integrate some stuff like Henri's 768m limit backport or add the odd patch from the patch sematary.

Speaking of the patch sematary, Steve Linden™ has posted a viewer roadmap, which in the middle somewhat indicates the Linden™ stance toward patches. This is nothing new. In the past features or changes already had least likelihood of acceptance, but it sort of clarifies how many (albeit not all) Linden™s or at least their studio bosses' view of outside contributions (tidbit 1). But this is fine by me, now that I managed to adjust my view (tidbit 2) and adapted myself towards this situation. In fact I'd wish they would make this even clearer and/or put that into a more prominent place, because that's not just something about the next quarter but also about the time since Summer 2007. Business as usual really.

Dazzle
I also gave 1.20 a whirl. Previously I had just seen the screen shots which did not thrill me to any extent and now having seen it live I am even more underwhelmed. I fully agree with Aimee Trescothick's excellent analysis about GUIs in general the dazzle GUI in particular.

This somewhat ties into Steve's roadmap, because as with patches, Dazzle it is of little surprise and mostly business as usual. They'll roll out early and repair the damage later. If anyone feels reminded of the voice GUI, this is no surprise because Dazzle is brought to you by the same team as the voice GUI, i.e. User Experience who's boss Benjamin Linden™ has an impressive track record of being resilient to outside opinions.

At least the roadmap says, they don't want to make the viewer mandatory before it offers user-skinning, but saying "However, this is the look we are planning to support going forward" is pretty much what I expected. It will be interesting though to see how or if things change with their new CEO (interview).

On the source side, I did a quick run of my patch script which showed that many of my patches need some (or even serious) attention to go into Dazzle. With no visible benefit whatsoever in this viewer I will ignore 1.20 and instead, when I find time, will spend it on EyeCandy instead.

CoolViewer
Boy Lane has posted a comment that a new version of Henri's CoolViewer is available. She says: "To give Nick time to relax in Spain...I've just updated the Cool Viewer for Windows with the new feature to build / TP over 768m and up to 4096m high. If someone needs that *smile*. Linux: (link) Windows: (link)". Barney also has a version for the Mac: (link)


Traffic vs. Showcase
As with the trademarks, Barney offers some good insights on traffic metrics. Prokofy also has thoughts on the issue and what I find pretty amazing are the comments there. Not having a business I'm not really interested in the issue, but if you are, these may be two good places to go.