• Neo

It is not just on the Beta Grid.

Please revert to the Live Viewer's separate chat history and IM window setup. This new 'Near Me' window when you click on History is obnoxious, and the inability to have IMs and Chat History open simultaneously (without tearing IMs free) is annoying.

Rewrite the communication UI to be something else entirely. I play at 720p resolution on a 52in widescreen and the new communications box took up a good part of the left side of my screen. That is unacceptable.

I do agree that the upper half of the window is oversized and I would suggest this as a partial solution. Reduce the size of the right hand area with the contact name, volume slider and mute radio buttons so that it takes up room only down to where two names fit on the left side. Then give us the option to resize that portion of the screen rather than having it a fixed height as it is now (by having a mouse over up/down arrows to let us raise lower the dividing bar between it and the lower actual chat/msg area). That way if we have a need to see more of the names of those present, we can resize while needed, and when we don't, we can shrink it back, even making it totally unseen if desired.

For me personally, having the near me be a tab I can switch to from the other IMs saves me real estate as I spend 90% of my day with both the chat history and IM windows open, plus the edit screen while building. The three windows add up to a rather sizable portion of my screen real estate, even on a 21" LCD.

A truly ideal situation would be where the IM/History windows could be separated and floated outside the viewer for those who run in window mode and be able to be positioned on monitor number two, if applicable.

If you're capable of creating UI mockups to show how you want things to be, feel free to attach pictures.

Also feel free to link to specific issues from this one addressing certain points!

I asked Benjamin Linden, our User Experience Designer, about this. A number of these design + usability issues are already known about to be corrected and ameliorated, including:

• A variety of layout fine-tuning
• Usage of screen space
• Ability to tear-off the Near Me/History tab like you can with others

... and more. We'll update you on these changes for iterative improvement as they come.

1. It's unclear whether simply opening an IM to someone invites them to a voice call, or if you have to press call first.
2. When you accept a group call, you still have to press join to actually join the call, why ask me to accept, if I just have to confirm again to join?
2b. I often end up getting multiple invites from one group, the accept message says who sent the invite, but not to what group I'm being invited.
2c. When you accept a private call, you still have to press call to join the chat. If they called me, and I accepted, why am I calling them back?
3. If you open a group chat does it automatically invite everyone in the group to use voice? Is there a way to initiate a group IM without inviting everyone to voice?

My suggestions:
1. Have a separate Call and IM button to make clear which you're doing. Then have them automatically join the call if you call them and they accept the call.
2. Automatically join group call, if already accepted.
2b. Ask to confirm group invite on a per group basis, not on a per user basis. (eg. "You have been invited to join the [Group Name] voice channel. Accept / Ignore"
2c. Automatically join private call if already accepted.
3. This could also be cleared up by having separate Call and IM buttons.

Feel free to add your own issues you've had with using voice. Note that this is just for areas that need usability improvement, not for or things not working.

1) near me window takes up too much real estate for functionality - top section needs to be able to be collapsed or the divider dragged
2) near me needs a tear off so it can be separated from IM
3) suggest near me avs panel use three modes - avatars in chat hidden - avatars shown (as now) - and micro announce mode - say a single line that displays who is talking via voice (shuffling names along in order that they speak)
4)tiny close boxes for leave panel in communicate boxes are difficult to click without closing communicate window - could use a mainstream button for leave im or close chat history
5) history button and ctrl-h not close as well as open chat history anymore
6) friends list needs a tear off

Apart from that - good work guys

I respect the idea to put all the communication stuff in one window, I get the idea, trying to create an Instant Messenger application like window thing, but the current way doesn't work and doesn't even follow standard aesthetics.

Here's what I'd do (To be constructive):

• Keeping Groups and Friends together isn't a bad idea. But tabbed windows aren't going to do it. You need to do it more like an IM Program window, with groups and friends listed in an Inventory like list box, hideable with a Friends and a Groups main group, then also allow us to create "folders" or "groups" in that list, so I can have a List of friends under the group (not a Group, but a group) title of "Close Friends", then another group of friends under "I don't like these people", like we can do with calling cards, but with the updated Friends UI. And! Allow the same grouping for Groups! That's a tall order, I know, but that's down the road, for now, just put those two windows back the way they were until you can get a better layout.

• Hide the voice stuff above Chat History when voice is disabled (or see the next idea). Even though it's kinda nice to see whose typing, just hide it, it's obtrusive, invasive and just not useful when you don't intend to use voice.

• Keep the voice stuff ontop of the Chat History in its own window. The Speakers window is a GREAT idea, pop everything thats in that top thing into Speakers instead, bam. Allow people who are not using voice to also open the Speakers window to see who is typing. Bam.

• IMs are fine in a separate window, we don't need them with local chat! Although this annoys me the least personaly.

• There should not be a chat thing in the Chat History, the chat bar at the bottom of the screen is fine as well!

So what about when you're doing an IM call thing? Pop the Speakers up and use that!

That's my ideas. Whatever you do, do something else than what we have now. It's just terrible guys, terrible! You can do better!

Furthermore, aside from it taking up far too much screen space, some instances one would prefer to not know whether and/or who is near them. For instance: certain types of combat sim situations, to encourage fair play.

In addition, one cannot view the friends list, the chat window, and the chat log at the same time. This was something I did on a daily basis, and relied upon.

In that issue, chet neurocam says:

====
The Communicate panel combines the Friends List/IM List with the Chat History box, as well as the Instant Message pane in which one reads messages. The way the communicate panel functions now does not let one have open the chat history box and the Instant Message pane at the same time. In previous viewers, the Instant Message pane was a floating window separate from the History floating window, allowing one to IM and monitor chat history at the same time.

The Communicate panel combines all these features, but only allows one to look at one feature at a time. This makes using these tools more difficult and removes a very important multi-tasking ability.

I'm requesting that the Communicate panel be redesigned, users to be given the option to use the new or old style, or the ability to detach these floating windows from the Communicate panel.
====

a) if you are using voice, you probably do not need the test history, so you loose screen space with that!
b) if you are not using voice, you don't need the volume controls etc. so you loose screen space with that!

So in trying to do both, you end up pleasing neither.

My suggestion would be to make these windows collapsable/hidable in some way. I would also suggest the default is to hide the text history if you have voice enabled and the volume options if you have voice disabled.

Having the IM window seperate from the Chat history window is extremely useful - at the very least the IM window should be capable of being torn off.

Having a duplicate of the entry window seems pointless, but at the very least make this also collapsable/hidable.

Although my own preference would be to have the nearme/speaker window, the text chat history window and the IM text window and the IM voice windoow all as seperate windows which can be popped up (into saved positions) or down from buttons in the bottom toolbar.

Major problem is the Communicate window is vast, that is recognised by LL and they are working on it.

My suggestions to reduce the size improve the functionality of the communicate window

Remove the Friends/Group tab from the communicate window, return it to a seperate button on the bottom of screen.
New Friends/Group window could be similar to origianl style or could look like current First Look tab or be l as Oz suggests
As it stands having the two Friends/Group tabs down the side takes up to much space. Move the tabs to the top or move the action buttons beneath the friends/group tabs. Making this tab narrower would enable the whole Communicate window to be narrower.

Should be possible to make the NEAR ME tab just a HISTORY tab, loose the list of names showing who is near and the volume slide /profile/ mute buttons.
Its not nescessary to have the list of active speakers/typists here, you can use the ACTIVE SPEAKERS window to perform this function.

(As it stands you cant stretch the communicate window vertically enough to see a useful number of names in the list if you also want a decent size history area. You cant stretch the window horizontally to get a decent long history area without compressing the names list.)

IM tab move the volume slider option to the area with Profile & Call buttons, makes more space for IM history in text box.
ADD a mute button to the area with Profile & Call buttons so you can quickly stop spam IM.

GROUP IM similar to Near me, loose the list and volume sliders, use the Active speakers window for this function

Other items I have noticed with voice/communicate, (sorry off on holiday ) so no time to compose or search for seperate Jira entries)

CTRL + H opens communicate window, but does not close it, instead jumps to the Near me tab if focus is on an IM tab or to the menu bar Veiw!!

If a private voice call does not initiate correctly, when you end the call the active speakers window empties, the white voice active dot disappears but you can still talk, be heard and hear.

Poorly adjusted / high microphone volume settings mean people can be heard across the entire SIM, this spoils the entire spatial effect.
Limit the range of voice to 10 to 20 metres, similar to chat distance where you can see name tags. Its a pain hearing people you cant see or identify.
Somehow add a shout / boost button to the voice, not to increase volume (well maybe a bit locally) but to extend range out to the 100m of text shout

Lindens, please either find a way to make the chatterbox reducible to just a few lines of text, the same way the chat history window was before, or else get rid of it altogether. It may have been a good idea in theory to put all communications options in one place, but in practice, its present implementation is extremely impractical.

For a discussion where there is a slide show for example, you may not be looking at the avatars, so this list is a great help in keeping track. I'd say make it expandable, to cater for when there are more than 5 names.

I realize these are all needed features but keep the window small and cut WAY back on the negative space around the volume sliders and whatnot.

I only have the windows open that I am using at any one time and I can arrange them where I want them on the screen depending on what activity I am engaged in.

I find this new all-in one window takes up too much screen real estate, is not really useful and in my opinion is not a very good UI design.

1) there is no easy way to bring up someone's profile from this window, which use to be a simple button on the older dialog. for support concerns (where people IM me with something broken and need a replacement) this was a HUGE time saver, and having it gone has mostly kept me out of the firstlook simply because it now takes far too long to help people whom IM with issues

2) There is no way to 'close' it easily with the keyboard, it used to work that ctrl+h brought up chat history and then ctrl+h closed it again, but that functionality no longer works with this dialog, once opened, you need to switch over to the mouse and click the x to close it... this also serves to just slow down dealing with chat/ims etc and should be reverted to the earlier behavior

3) there is no way to 'close' the main chat and just deal with IM's, its not a huge deal, but when i'm getting several im's a minute and chat is happening it often gets confusing which tab is which and i'll end up responding in the wrong ones

4) agreement with everyone else that the list makes the dialog too huge now and should be pared to a seperate interface/floater or at least have one of those funky little '^' type things you can push to make it appear/dissapear above the dialog like many audio players/web browsers have these days

This is a terrible design. While they wanted to add everything in one place, I think they could of done a way better job then this.

1. I do like that the chat entry bar shows up on Chat History now. That's good. Keep that, but fix the bug with it not playing nice with the "main" chat bar.
2. I think the "tabs" at the bottom of the screen for voice, music/movie control, etc., are good. You should keep those just like they are.

That said, I think that IM and chat -and yes, even the Friends list- were far, far more usable the way they used to be. For instance, I'm not totally sure as to how I can actually mute an object now. That IS possible still, right? I rarely mute users (though with voice, I'll definitely be doing it more!) but I DO mute people's spammy channel 0 scripts on a daily basis. "NOW DRINKING A BIG MARTINI ZOMG" is not something I want to hear 30 times in a row.

I think that it's important have an easy way to access the list of speakers "near me", but I can already do that without having the Communicate window up – the button for that is in the voice chat tab at the bottom of the SL window.

So aside from that, are there really any changes that made this more usable? Obviously the bugs can be worked out (The ones that bug me the most are the problems with Ctrl-Shift-F, Ctrl-T and Ctrl-H not working properly, the "IM Received" button never going away unless clicked, and the chat entry bar still popping up when entering text in the chat bar in the Communicate window) but I'm skeptical that this new setup is actually better. I'm not necessarily opposed to an integrated chat/IM/voice/friends UI, but I don't think this one does it well, and I think it does it at the cost of usability we already had.

I NEED ctrl-H, esc, return to function just exactly as they do now - it would be a huge timewaster for me to realearn what has become muscle memory!
Also, I am not planning to ever use spatial voice - It's a mess, I don't want to hear it, or transmit on a spatial channel.

However, 1:1 voice chat could be an advantage in some situations - so I would like a layout which is the same as the text chat-only client, with additional, optional windows to control voice.

And, yes, the profile button needs to come back!

While I'm at it, I have often wished for an option to easily add someone who is standing in front of me into a group. Maybe, since the UI is being redesigned, that could be added as well?

Being able to return to separate Friends and Chat History via tear-off windows might solve most of the difficulties. Those tear-offs (including size and placement), however, should be persistent across SL sessions so they don't have to be re-created over and over. The wasted space at the top of this window speaks for itself, so I'm sure that will be addressed.

I do miss a fast and easy Friends button on the bottom button bar, too. That's of more use to me than a Fly button, if button triage has to be done.

I will NEVER use SL Voice. I do NOT want 1/4 or more of my screen consumed by a supposedly "optional" fature that I am supposed to be able to DISABLE. At the very least, if a user disables Voice Chat in their preferences, the parts of this UI that are useful ONLY to people who are using Voice should be minimized or absent, and should not take up screen space.

The Chatterbox UI is WAY too large, and makes it impossible to run SL in a window unless you have a freakishly huge monitor. In a normal 800 by 600 window, it covers over 1/2 of the screen in anything resembling a usable form. That means that with this UI, I am essentially BLIND while attempting to do text chat or IM messages in Text. I can't see any of this lovely 3D world while communicating with anyone, unless I consent to using Voice as my only means of communication. And I will NOT do that.

Please note that there is a MAJOR difference between the UI for something like the Map or Search taking over most or all of the screen, and the UI for an element that is likely to be constantly open doing the same thing. The UI for the Map or Search only needs to remain open briefly when used. The UI for Text and IM chatter needs to be open constantly, or you can't keep track of a conversation.

Suggestions:

We do NOT need a single "swiss army knife" approach to the UI. The idea of lumping so many controls in one UI is not a functional improvement.

Remove all UI features from Chatterbox that are not intimately related to Voice Chat. Make it a voice-only control system.

Make the other UI functions available as a seperate interfaces, much as they are right now. This would include the option of opening a UI window only for one aspect at a time of the Voice-related controls. For example, a text-only user might want to at least know that someone is trying to speak with Voice Chat in their vacinity. If for no other reason than to be able to tell them to turn off the mike and type if they want to be 'heard'.

If audio is muted, that volume control should NOT be displayed.

My suggestions:

1. Move the "Friends" and the "Groups" tabs to the top. There's only two of them. There's NO REASON they have to take up such a huge column width.

2. Integrate voice into the Friends List through a similar scheme as the "can see me online" "can see me on the map" etc. buttons, so that I can sort my Friends List by people who have voice enabled, and people who don't.

3. Separate button for IMing and Calling, that way I can call someone directly from my friends list. This needs to happen.

4. Separate chat history, flist, and IMs (I'm repeating this for emphasis). Resizing the communicate window to free up screen space makes the Friends List too small (I can only see half of someone's name). This would also mean adding back the Friends tab at the bottom.

5. Remove the "Pause" button from the music stream tab. You can't pause the stream anyway. It's confusing.

6. The voice section of the "near me" tab should also be separate. I want to be able to see who is talking to me on voice while I'm IMing in-game. Having to switch from IMs to the near me tab is annoying.

7. If you absolutely have to (for some god knows reason) keep the Near Me tab, will you PLEASE add the ability to close it? Right now, every time I IM someone I lose the ability to follow what's said in chat. This really hurts the user experience.

8. Push-to-talk triggers should allow key combos. I'm on a laptop, I don't have a middle mouse button, and the only keys I have free to bind to push-to-talk are the F keys. It would be much easier to be able to hit "ALT-T" (or some other memorable combination) to toggle my voice.

That being said, I really like the new master volume tab. Very, very useful. It adds to functionality rather than taking any away. Also, integrating the friends and groups lists is a nice improvement, and I'd hate to see that change. I hope you use at least one of my suggestions, as I think all of these would vastly improve the user experience in the new voice client. My two cents, and all that.

@ Torley: I'll make a mockup of my propsed UI fixes and upload it later today

Please remember to file separate issues for bugs and feature requests referenced here, and link them back. This thread is good for discussion, but in order to be more granular and effective with the details (as there are so many of them), we need to distinguish between issues so they can be actioned and resolved.

And another thing I noted: it's now impossible to keep chat-spam on the main screen removed. With the current interface, if I have the IM window up and the chat history up, I won't get any text chatter on the main screen. Which is quite important for a builder. With communicate, I can't have the same - one thing will show up in the big screen, regardless of what I have up in the communicate window. If you go the communicate window, give us a way to control what text should still go to the main screen - the main screen chatter is annoying for builders.

In my opinion the only thing that should change with Voice is the addition of the "near me" tool, which I can show/hide depending on what I am doing.

Compared to the current "communicate" button? this is a good design. Yes please!

It takes up too much room, and I prefer the current functionality of the IM system- in that all chat IMs can be floated off as a tabbed window away from the local discussion. The main reason I like the current system is that I can take the IM window, with all its group, and conference and other random flashing tabs, and minimize it while I'm focusing on the local stuff. Then it doesn't bother me, I don't get more flashing tabs blinking at me.

With the voice first look, if you detach the IMs from the communication panel, you can't stack them in tabbed groups. Maybe if there was a way to float off all comms stuff into seperate windows, but with stacks of tabs that would be better- even more so if you could set some preference that will do it the way you like. That way you could allow for the current system, and the first look system. You could also allow people to run seperate message window stacks for friends/groups/strangers.

Chat line in the local chat history is neat, I like that- you could get rid of the bottom line chat line if that window is active i think maybe.

I would make the top half (name list of those nearby) an optional floating and dockable window. It may well be handy to have an avatar radar without having to use the LSL scripted ones, but I think it should be optional- let people snap it onto their communication window if they want to, or float it somewhere else, or not view it at all.

That is my constructive criticism of the first look system I've spared you the rant

For my part, I think my frustration is simple. The Chat History and IM windows need to be two totally independent things. Being able to toggle now is nice, but now I'm toggling my IMs as well, and that's counterintuitive. Tearing off the Chat History is nice, but toggling puts it right back into the Communicate box, and then I'm toggling IMs again. I have to tear off the History constantly if I toggle a lot (and I do). Bottom line, having the chat history as part of the Communicate box simply isn't going to work.

In my opinion, the chat history needs to be entirely separate from the Communicate window.

Make this change, along with the ongoing tweaks to free up more real estate (it is still rather bulky), and I will be happy with the Communicate button.

1. Minor improvements to the friends pane to provide more room to work.

2. Separate chat pane.

3. Major clean up in the Near Me pane.

It's a bit sloppy, but you can see what I'm getting at.

VWR-1550 - Proposal to regard the new UI as a useful but failed experiment and revert to the old behaviour

VWR-1549 - Proposal and patch to move the Friends and Groups tabs under My Friends from the Left to the Top to make better use of the window

VWR-1551 - Proposal to seperate the Near Me list (and volume control) from the chat history and into its own window/tab

I need to be able to separate chat history, IM tabs, the friends list, and the volume controls into four separate, size and shape changeable, potentially very small windows. This way, I can track them all at once. I especially need to be able to view chat history and the IM sessions I am in, at the same time, without having to toggle between them.

Also, it is very unlikely that once I am in a text IM session with someone, I am going to be using voice with them, and much more likely I will use voice with one person at a time, so there's no reason to attach a huge volume control to everything having to do with text. Possibly a tiny button that could be expanded if needed, would make more sense.

Imagine what it would be like to have someone open up a new IM with you every five minutes, until you have six or twelve IM sessions going on at the same time, while still having to chat with the people next to you, and you will have some idea of what I deal with frequently. All this while still having to see where I am going walking around, too. The old interface was tolerable for this, but the Communicate window is impossible. It gives me the impression that the designer never thought you would talk with more than one person at a time.

1. "Near Me" text chat/history MUST be separate from IM chat in order for either to be useful. As I understood it from experience, the whole POINT of the history window is so that you can keep up with local discussion even when you have to be flipping between IMs. Brenda Archer is dead-on about this one.

2. "My friends/groups" should be its own window. The chat history window is WIDE, the friends and group lists should be TALL. Combining them leads to wasted space and more mouse motion for nothing.

3. Putting the "Near Me voice volume/mute controls" on the top of the "Near me chat history" was a VERY bonehead UI decision. Similar to Similar to #2, that should be in a separate window so that when I want to attenuate/mute a speaker I don't need to scroll and scroll and scroll to find them. Combined with the immense about of screen real estate it wastes, this move, and the length of time it has remained that way in the build, is fireable offense. I hope for your sake a college intern designed that UI, not a well-paid specialist (no offence, but COME ON!)

Basically - THE SCREEN SHOTS AT THE TOP IF THIS BUG ARE SPOT-ON! Implement those and then you can happily go back to assuring people that voice won't cause lag instead of beating down the hoards of people screaming about how ugly and unusable the voice client is.

VWR-1550 makes a very excellent point about the big picture problems involved with focusing all communication into a single window like this. It really takes away from the multi-faceted connectedness of the SL experience and makes me wonder why we're bothering with a 3D rendering engine if it's just going to be covered up with a poorly designed IM/voice client. This consolidation has gone totally wrong, keep the windows separate so that we don't forget about the world while we chat.

I've voted for this issue and all the other issues that propose fixes for the above problems. You should too.

Integration of the 'near me' avatar sensor and voice volume slider in chat history REALLY downgrades the usability of this window.

I have to wonder if any of the user interface designers actually TALK much within SL? I and everyone I know are all very capable of multi-tasking, and frequently build, edit things or sort inventory while talking to people in BOTH chat AND multiple IMs. With the current interface (pre-voice in main client) it is possible to see a large part of what is going on in the world AND have edit/inventory windows open AND an IM window AND the chat history, all on one 1280x744 screen (in my case).

With the new interface in First Look, the chat history takes up the entire height of the screen if you have it open to any usable extent - which is to say 8-10 lines of text. That is a HUGE and unacceptable misappropriation of screen 'real estate' or viewer resources - made doubly bitter for anyone who is not actually USING voice at the time, and doesn't NEED the volume slider. If this part of the window could MINIMISE at will, it would be a fantastic improvement

The avatar scanner is a good idea but frankly every scripted scanning system I've used in SL is better and far less obtrusive than what you have come up with in this window.

Please, please, LL, don't forget that while voice may be a great feature, it shouldn't force a DOWNGRADE to the existing feature of TYPE - which a majority of users still want.

Thank you, however, from the bottom of my heart, for adding the 'tear off' option to chat history. I look forward to further improvements based on all our comments

As someone who probably isn't going to use voice very often, frankly, I'd say keep voice in a separate UI much as is recommended above. Also, please go back to the separate chat history and IM windows! I frequently have them both up so I can monitor local chat and respond to it quickly while still keeping up with IMs. Having them in the same window means that I sometimes forget about the local chat and essentially "zone out" with the people I'm supposed to be with.

If I just wanted to IM and voice people I would stick with current web tools that already work with much less frustrations and system resources. What's the point of a 3D space to meet and share experiences if you can't see it.

Please get this right before rolling it out into the regular viewer.

Friends, groups, chat history and IM need to be in

FOUR SEPARATE RE-SIZABLE WINDOWS.

Imagine the following:

A meeting of twenty avatars, not all of whom can voice (some are on Linux or at work), all of them talking at once, so the chat history is moving nonstop.

My avatar is walking around meeting people, showing them inside, looking for security issues. My voice is on, for security's sake.

Every two to five minutes a new IM comes in, and it will not wait; some of them will become conversations. Eventually ten of them are open at once, making a horizontal band across the top of my screen, which means I have to tab across it to catch new blinking tabs. Yes. I'm talking to all ten of them AND running the meeting.

People are requesting teleports, so I have to Search. People are requesting to join the group, so I have to pull up group Info.

ALL THIS IS GOING ON AT ONCE.

How the hell am I supposed to be able to do this with the new Communicate window and still see any part of a 3D world?

Can you guys at Linden Labs maybe hire someone with interface design experience if you're not actually going to listen to us?

what part of "this communicate window idea is crap" aren't you hearing?

You know, adding a "voice floater" would have been far prefferable to trying to merge all three functions into one mwindow. They don't belong together. Even chat history and IMs don't belong together. If you MUST attach the voice to something, then do it to chat history, but please for the love of pete.. give us back the "Classic" IM/Friedns/groups window.

Separate windows, friends, chat history, IMs worked very nicely for many things. The friends window was comparatively large, but, for me at least, open, use, close so not a significant worry. History, very much the same, IMs, by choice often open but only about 5 lines deep across the top of the page.

I don't care about the voice options, I'm hard of hearing and won't be using them. Giving a fourth window for that, great, let people that want to use it have the access options, those that don't have the ability to ignore them. Similarly, I have little need to alter volumes rapidly, so why on earth is it a fixed feature on my screen? Offering it to toggle, fine, but pemanent, come on guys. You're talking about moving to a more flexible interface on one hand, then forcing a ton of things that are chewing screen space and not giving us any choices about it. Left hand - Right hand situation?

Mixing Friends into chat history and IM is forcing the window to be too tall to be friendly. Tall but narrow "IM window" when I often have about 20+ IMs open at once is not friendly either. Do I become a recluse, and refuse to communicate, or give up a shed load of screen estate for an add on that I don't want? Gee, thanks for making those of us excluded in RL feel so welcome in this brave new world that you're making it harder for us to communicate in SL where we've done pretty well for 4 years.

You could at least give us an option to revert to the old UI if we don't have voice enabled. How hard can that be?

Also, because IMs are crammed into the Communicate window, whenever someone is IMing me, I have a stream of text cluttering the bottom of my screen. It was much better when I could close IM windows when I didn't need to be looking at them, and when someone IMed me a reply in an IM conversation, I'd get the nice little IM sound and the IM button tucked down at the bottom left corner of the screen.

The 'Contacts Panel' is also worse than the old Friends panel. It is at the same time larger, while showing less information. This is hardly an ideal change. You're forced to resize it if you want to see more names, and resize it again when you're done with it, but still not able to resize it enough to tuck it out of the way.

As it is, I lose a full quarter of my 19 inch screen, and gain absolutely nothing.

Already, the 'mainstream' folks are running up against this... thing... and are looking for ways to backgrade (see: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=201538 ).

Yes, I'm frustrated - and disinclined to 'take advantage' of this wonderful 'JIRA' conduit to LL in the future, given how well it worked in this case. Why should we bother? Is anyone at LL even reading this? <shrugs>

Same here, too damn big and I am on a 19" screen....all I gained out of it was frustration and finding it a whole lot more difficult and annoying to use. I thought the point of an interface revision was to make things easier to use? BIG step backwards...I consider the current release a downgrade and going back to the previous version an upgrade.

Tengu Yamabushi - "Yes, I'm frustrated - and disinclined to 'take advantage' of this wonderful 'JIRA' conduit to LL in the future, given how well it worked in this case. Why should we bother? Is anyone at LL even reading this"

The JIRA is just what I expected it to be...a way of hiding info from the masses while giving those that actually figure it out (MAN, the interface on this is worse than the commcenter!) the warm fuzzies....nothing more.

To Linden lab -

Unless you were overpromising yet again, wasn't the POINT of the redo of the messaging system to allow for VARIATIONS of the client? If so, WHY force us all into using this new commcenter? Why not have a checkbox in the client 'new or old communications' and let us SELECT the method of communicating? OR for those of us that are non-voice and do not need voice features (the supposed reason fot this travesty...ever consider a floating window? Or controls at hte bottom of the screen like for music and video?) an automatic default to the old-style setup?

I am frustrated, I am angry that you would do this after all the above feedback...and ESPECIALLY after the last week of bugs, search issues, etc. For ONCE in your lives, listen to the CUSTOMERS and give us OPTIONS, not done deals and lip service about customer satisfaction surveys.

This new client is broken, I NEED MY friends list back!!!! I can't live with seeing only four friend at a time... It's a HELL to see how is online, The only other options is to cover up all the 3d view and never see my avie again, but that makes walking around a little hard. Omg, Ajax life just passed the official viewer in usability.
https://ajaxlife.katharineberry.co.uk/client/login.kat

my suggestion: get rid of it. i want my old separate friends list + im tabbed window back.
put the voice stuff in an extra window, i'm not going to use it anyways.

voice can be disabled in preferences. what about the idea that disabling voice gives you the old chat/IM/friendslist windows back, and enabling voice gets you this new communication window?

voice can be disabled in preferences. what about the idea that disabling voice gives you the old chat/IM/friendslist windows back, and enabling voice gets you this new communication window?"

I see what you're saying, but I would like to be able to listen to, or even use, Voice when it would be preferable, but still have the old UI. The voice control options are already at the bottom of the screen, it's redundant to put them on the chat history as well. In addition to not adding anything to the Voice "experience", the shoehorned Friends List tab and issues with IM and chat history are all still big problems with the new UI whether you're using Voice or not.

"Contacts (Friends list and Groups list) can remain combined,"
If it does remain combined, it really ought to be redesigned. But, no, even that's not ideal because you'll still want to resize it to see more friends/groups at a time, it should be a separate button so you're not always resizing your chat history back and forth between using it as a chat history and using it as a Friend list.

I tried to pull the Contacts out of the Chatterbox, but only success in allow it to be teared out of the giant box. And the size of the contacts doesn't seen to be saved either, outside of the chatterbox. Guess the chatterbox control is in the actual code

What people think?

1. Separate the IMs and Friends list from Communicate. Make a communicate window for those who choose to use voice. I will never use voice.

2. Restore the IM window to it's former, horizontal tabbed, wide and short state, with flashing tabs indication new IMs in those tabs. The current Communicate box is so large and unwieldy as to make it impossible to move and have an IM conversation at the same time.

3. Restore the vertical Friends list which is tall and narrow. (Please make it accurate, too.) There are many times I want to open it quickly to see who is on without losing my current IM tab.

4. Take the typing window out of History. It is redundant with the typing window at the bottom of the page and it takes unnessary screen real estate,.

At the very minimum, please allow us to resize the Communicate window so it does not take a significant portion of my screen, OR allow us to reinstall the old version of the viewer before voice, which has disappeared from your Download page.

Can be get rid of the groups tab in this window? It is only occasionally used, and it is easily available through a number of other mechanisms. Let it pop up in a separate window, like before.

After reading many of the posts above, it's clear to me that there were many styles and preferences as to how users configured and operated their Friends, Groups, Chat History and IMs (both separately and in conjunction with one another). They did so because they had the freedom to customize the utilities of SL to best meet their needs. Yet, with the advent of the Comms multi-function widow (MFW?), one thing seems glaringly clear: The "option pool" feels a whole lot shallower.

I'm surely not against the addition of new ideas and techniques for doing things, but I'm against the removal of old/standard/tried-and-true features in order to make way for new features that have not been proven to be adequate replacements.

That said, here is what I'd personally like to see:

1. I want the option to use the new Communicate button and corresponding Communication MFW, or to use the old interface once I decide that I don't like the new one.

or

2. Give me the option to tear out Friends/Groups/IMs/Chat History from the Communicate window AND, once torn out, have each individual window appear as it used to. I don't want a separate window for each freaking IM session I have going...I want my old IM window back.

finally...

3. From a slightly more philosophical point of view, don't ever make a GUI that's antagonistic to the premise of your program. What is it that we're supposed to be enjoying here? Second Life. So don't choke out my SL with a GUI that doesn't know what it wants to be. I don't log in every day just so that I can stumble through some blunder of an interface. I come here to interact with the world around me. When the interface gets to be an space/attention-hog, you've created a big problem.

Also, if you want to have the IM and chat history windows at a decent size you have to shrink down the friends list to the extent that you can't see just who is online at a time, especially if you have a lot of people in your list.

That said I do like the option to have chat history in the same window as IMs - I think I would use this. But it should be an option, as I can totally agree with people who like having those two seperate as well.

Everybody who likes a peek at an alternate (reverted) approach, check the "bleeding edge" releases on http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/ (it is an alternate (non Linden) viewer build which has a lot of GUI parts changed or taken back).

Feel free to take screenshots of the parts you like there and run them by the Lindens as examples of how you want things done.

I want and expect to have the old pre voice chat history and im windows and friends list solo with nothing added and my old button setup across the bottom of the screen with the same functionality it had before the voice upgrade.

I have not and will not upgrade to the new voice client. If I am ever forced to update to the voice client I will not think about that.

What you should have done and what you need to do is have a voice and a non voice client. The non voice being just like it was pre voice upgrade not with any of the new features at all. The loss of the chat box always having focus was bad enough this new client is a pain.

I tried the voice client on the beta and first look viewers and I have to wonder just how your techs thought a fugly box taking up over 1/4 of the screen for functionality that most will never even use was a good idea. Change for changes sake is never a good idea. Back this out and rethink the whole thing please.

I do not care or mind at all if others want to chat with voice but do NOT force it and all the extra bells and whistles that it entails on everyone.

Give me a non Voice client that is like just before the voice update but add in chat focus never being lost.

I used to flip "Friends" open all the time to see who was online. Can't do it now (Communicate is butt ugly, too big and has a 50/50 whether it's going to be friends or groups).
I used to have 3 or 4 different "Communicate" windows open all in different parts of the screen. I might have had 2 IMs, a chat history Friends all at the same time. The ONLY one I would ever consider tabbing was IMs (usually I did just leave them as tabs).

Can the non-idiots please have the non-idiotic layout back?

My vote added here...

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1678

I added tow patches to it yesterday...