Striking a blow for the little guy, Radegast

I'm a fan of Radegast, a lightweight SL viewer that pares down graphics and other functions.  I use it when I just want to do something simple like clear messages or chat in IM (especially if I'm on my backup computer), but some artists (like Jo Ellsmere and Oberon Onmura) use it to run bots that are part of their work. Radegast was orphaned when its developer passed away, but fortunately someone volunteered to take it over and it's alive again. (Thank you, Cinder Roxley!)

A few ago, Norton Security stopped me from using it by cutting off its access to my internet, thinking it's a malicious program. After a few days of this, I was pretty annoyed. So I made a "false positive" report to Norton and -- hurrah! -- they just told me they'll take it off their blacklist.  Might take a day or two for that to appear in their updates. Lesson: Complain, because sometimes it works.

Linden Labs to Third Party Viewers: "Get Lost"

This just in from Linden Labs: they've changed their Third Party Viewer policy. They claim that some of the changes have to do with privacy (I'm not convinced they're legitimate privacy issues, but OK). But one change has nothing to do with privacy -- it's strictly intended to squash innovation:

2.k: You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

LL will break many of TPV features in the next few days. So goodbye region windlights until LL's own viewer gets that feature ... if it ever does. Region windlights were an extraordinary boon to the arts community. [EDIT: see discussion in comments.]

The announcement adds,

We encourage Third Party Developers to continue innovating with unique user interfaces, niche features, and ways of interacting with the virtual world, and we look forward to working in partnership with developers on ideas they have for new or improved shared experiences for all of Second Life. We want to incorporate more innovative new features into Second Life to improve the experience for all users, and we encourage TPV developers to submit proposals through our standard process.

Yeah, right. It's horseshit. Basically all TPVs are allowed to do is tinker with the user interface and a couple of other things.  And as I read it, if the TPV developers come up with ideas, basically they have to work for Linden Labs for free.

See the Phoenix announcement for more.

Region Control of Windlight!; or, Linden Labs Straggles After Phoenix ... Again

New World Notes reports that Linden Labs is going to make it possible for regions and estates to establish Windlight sky, water and day settings that will kick in automatically for anyone using the standard viewer.  Well, about bloody time, there's been a JIRA request for this since June 2008!  And the Phoenix viewer already has a way to establish parcel Windlight settings, with some limitations (it only works for Phoenix, and with settings already on a user's computer), but also some snazzy options (you can have different settings by altitude).

Various artists use Windlight to establish the lighting and atmospheric environment for experiencing their installations, and finally making it possible for Windlight settings to come immediately into effect for everyone will, I hope, expand the range of artists interested in using it.  I applaud LL for at last providing one of the true infrastructure improvements that people have been asking for.  Now, if only they'd stop being such dicks about megaprims and nanoprims, extend LSL's function set, improve terraforming tools....