Second Life Viewer 2

The new Second Life viewer is now available for download and I have very mixed feelings about it. On the positive side, they are clearly making an effort to make Second Life easier to use and the new look has some positive features for new users. The most significant positive feature is that you can fiddle around with the interface and figure things out. With the old client, you nearly always had to ask someone how to do something. The second positive feature is that much of the unnecessary functionality (at least unnecessary to new visitors) available in the old client is now hidden.

On the other hand, the new client is somewhat frustrating to veteran users. I am constantly trying to figure out how to do something that I already knew how to do using the old client. Some times I just give up and relog using the old client.

I've also noticed a new Welcome Island and a new Discovery Island. Apparently these islands replace the old Orientation and Help Islands. Personally, my favorites were the ones a few generations ago that had a Disney Land feel to them. But, critiquing the new client and the new islands seems to miss the point.

There was a hit movie in the late 1960's called Midnight Cowboy staring John Voight and Dustin Hoffman. In this movie Hoffman played a homeless character in New York City named Ratso. One day Ratso steals some items from a sidewalk stand and takes them home for dinner. The items are just whatever he could grabs so he makes a makeshift salad out of coconut, green beans and yellow squash or some similar hodgepodge. Later on in the movie Ratso falls asleep and dreams of being the star of a cooking show. With great fanfare he makes his salad of coconut, green beans, and yellow squash. It is both sad and funny because he has no idea how to cook and thinks whatever he does had appeal if he can just get it out in front of the right audience.

With the new client and new islands, Linden Labs is once again offering its coconut, green bean, and yellow squash salad to its customers. I suspect that the reception will be no better this time than it has been in the past. If you want to be the star of a cooking show, you need to learn how to cook. And if you want to offer software applications in an application dense environment, you need to learn how to design them.