In an announcement about the new release candidate Ramzi Linden states:'Many of you asked for the Dazzle theme to be optional, and we are glad to tell you we have rearranged our plans and resources to now work on just that. We had wanted to do theme switching originally, but had been focused on stability. We realize now we don’t want Residents to opt for the older viewer just to keep the classic look– where you would continue to suffer from bugs that have been fixed in the newer viewer.'
This new iteration (the 39th) does NOT have the optional User Interface hopefully in the next few releases there will be progress on it:
'We would now like to direct more development on the first stages of the Skinning project (this is the UI flexibility that brought a new Dazzle look to the viewer). To start, we are now developing a solution to VWR-5059 - “Ability to switch between the new/old theme” - and will ship that before finalizing the official Second Life Viewer 1.20.'
My first reaction and that of friends has been WOW a Linden actually listened to the widespread concerns about Dazzle and the general discontent over the way it works, even for those with perfect 20/20 vision its been a huge cause of dismay. Sometimes LL gets it right.
Also to be noted is the length of time taken to roll out this iteration; some may complain but I would much rather it actually worked the way it's intended before it is forced on the multitudes and drives more people away.
One comment I noted was that working on Dazzle is just 'prettying up the UI' instead of fixing the problems of stability etc, well i suppose if driving half of the userbase away because of dazzle reduces the strain on the asset servers then leaving dazzle as it is could be a good idea and would reduce the workload at LL, but it should be noted:
'The themes themselves are minor effects for sure; but getting to a place of having them means real hard work to get the User Interface abstracted will be under the hood. It’s something that Dazzle Project started and the Skinning Project would ultimately take much farther. Imagine that the UI code is general enough that you can replace the colors on the fly… Then imagine it is general enough that you can take out buttons that you don’t want (or put buttons where you want them.) Someday (still far away) the UI is abstracted enough to run windows outside the 3D view of the world. This is the intent of Skinning, and starts with a tiny step.
We’re committed to improving the User Interface of Second Life– part of that is getting the code to catch up!'
There also seems to be some people who think the complaints are about DAZZLE as a whole; Dazzle is a lot more than just a change of colours and I love a lot of the new features of Dazzle, but I, like many, find the colour the main problem with it. Other issues pointed out are the IM tabs not blinking so you don't actually realise someone is talking to you and removal of the tools button from the main UI until you edit something - those are just minor gripes compared with the colour issue. Overall DAZZLE is a change for the better ONCE the colour and contrast issues are sorted out.
The main point here is that Linden Lab actually LISTENED to a majority of Residents, our shouts for a CHOICE were heard, most iterations of the main viewer are COMPULSORY
so for once LL have taken notice and I say well done!
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