New Lightweight SL Client
Written on November 2, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
When I logged into Second Life™ tonight, the message of the day informed me that I ought to investigate their new SLim client, which they say “enables Second Life Residents to text or voice chat with SL Friends without having the SL viewer open.”
That sounded pretty good to me, so in spite of the rather confusing instructions on the download page, I grabbed both pieces, the client and viewer. Hmmm… I thought the SL client was the viewer? Oh, well, terminology…. Anyway, I followed the instructions on the Mac FIRSTLOOKSLIM disk image, and dragged the icon (whether it’s the viewer or the client I’m not sure) into my Applications folder, and did the same thing with the icon in the other image, called “SLim”, even though there were no instructions for what to do with it at all, just a EULA. mutter, mutter.
According to the download page, I also need to create an account, using my SL avatar’s name, but with a different password (oh, good, another password to remember). I wonder if that means a new account for each alt account, too? Probably, but that also means I probably won’t use it for them unless this thing is just too useful.
I had a moment of panic, trying to decide which app is the client and which the “application”, but after trying each decided the “viewer” is the one I have to log into first. OK, I’ve done that. It looks just like any SL viewer. Now I’ve logged out of there, and after creating an account for SLim (from a button on the download page), I’m opening the SLim app — that’s the one that had no instructions included. That opens a smaller window which should have displayed all my friends. It was blank. Oh, ok, RTFM…. I have to not only log on with the special viewer, I must enable voice in that viewer as well. That done, I do see a long list of names in the SLim viewer now, but quite a few people, including some I know are online, are missing. There is one person shown here that I think I can pester to try out the IM with, though.
I highlight his name, and click the little icon for IM. There’s one for voice as well, but I don’t want to push it. Uh, oh. I got a bubble that says, “[person] is using a version of the Second Life Viewer that does not support IM or Voice sessions with this application.” This is not helpful. Well, it’s beta software, after all, and brand new. Guess I’ll let it mature a bit and wait for more people to install it before I try to actually use the thing. Pity.
