AjaxLife for the iPhone

If you are unfamiliar with AjaxLife it is described as followed: "AjaxLife is a web app that allows you to log in to the Second Life virtual world from almost anywhere."
Of course there are some limits to this, most notably that you don't see the 3D world. Functionally you can do lot, for example chat, teleport, pay and tranfer inventory. This is usefull if you need to login to SL from a computer that doesn't has or can't run the Viewer.

To bring this functionality to even more devices and locations a iPhone version has been released. Though this version does not has as much functionality as the web app yet. So far you can Chat, send IMs to your your friends List and recieve IMs. This is a cool and quick way to say hi to a friend or answer a customer while you are on the road, or when you are at a boring movie for example.

To use it you can browse with your iPhone or iPod touch to http://ajaxlife.net . Or if you don't have a iPhone you can use http://iphonetester.com/ (seems to work best in Safari) and browse to ajaxlife.net/?iphone in it.

Pictures of AjaxLife via the iphone tester

There was some trouble with posting this and had to redo it 2 times, my apologies for the repeats in your rss readers.

How to stop the Tools menu from Hiding

The tools menu gets automatically hiding in the 1.20 release of the Second Life viewer. This was done to reduce the number of menus presented to the (new) users. It only becomes visible when the 'Build' window is open.

I like the idea of removing menu items, to make SL looks less daunting for the new User. It seems though that the change is unpopular with and it is going to be changed back in the 1.21 viewer. For the people who can't wait to have it back, Jacek explained on her blog how to have the Tools menu back permanently with just some simple copy and paste.

This trick is a simple one. Since SL looks for the Tools menu by name to find which menu to hide, all you have to do is change its name, and SL won’t find it, and it’ll stay visible all the time!

The really easy way (download the replacement file):

1. Download my pre-chewed XML file to “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/”, replacing the existing one. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then put the file in “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/”.
2. Restart SL, enjoy.

The slightly less easy way (edit the file yourself):

1. Open up “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/menu_viewer.xml” in your text editor. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then open up “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/viewer-menu.xml” with TextEdit (or your favorite text editor).
2. Search for: name="Tools" (it’s on line 590)
3. Change name="Tools" to name="Toolz" or some other non-Tools word.
4. Save the file, restart SL, enjoy.

Voila, your Tools menu will now be visible all the time. Piece of cake

Everything black. With accents of black!

There are three little greeen icons that can appear on the minimap. The first, is a dot, representing avatars at the same elevation as you. The second, a "T" represents avatars above you, and the third is an upside down "T" for those that are below you.

In your travels across the great wide grid, you'll see lots of gray shapes on the mini-map-- representing things that other people own. This neon green icons are so vivid and so bright, you'll have no problem knowing where your fellow avatars are.

That is, unless, you own a good chunk of land with a lot of stuff on it. In that case, the items you possess, are colored in with delightful neon cyan.

Let's do some color math here. The kind of new math they teach the kids today:

light neon green + light neon cyan = impossible legibility.

I've explored the metaverse on both Windows- and Macintosh- based PCs, with a variety of cards and on a variety of monitors-- and the results are the same! Total and complete illegibility! (As an aside, avatars on the same elevation as you are green dots, that do have a hairline black outline, so that's at least easIER to see.)

Perhaps a preference where we can specify the color of our items or avatar icons? Some people might have a difficult time navigating this; others might be colorblind, and some might want the mySpace-ian trend of bright green icons on bright green backgrounds. Let the users decide. Put the front end team on this, while the backend team plugs away at the heart of the system.

It's the little things.