Monday 12 March, 2007

My second life

And for once I'm not talking about yoga!

At Yoe'sYes, I had to check out the hype and log into Second Life.

First impressions - it's not much and it's quite a lot. It's really what you make it, not a lot is happening but if you like exploring and tinkering and building it can be all you want. I can easily see why it's called "Second Life" - it's very easy to get lost in it and before you know two hours have gone past... Partly because I'm running it on my Mac, on my little laptop which is pushing it to the limit... but I'm slowly moving away from all Windows software - if everything goes like I want, Apple will release Panther this month and then I'll replace our desktop PC with a nice new iMac... so I wanted to check out the Mac version of the SL client.

But partly because I don't find the interface particularly intuitive - it's surprising how much I have to use the help to figure out how to do things. Like today, I was at Yoe's house and I was trying to figure out how to leave a notecard in her mailbox. Clicking the mailbox seemed like an obvious thing to do, but left-clicking it didn't do anything. Right-clicking it brought up a menu but there was no "leave note" option. Clicking myself for an action didn't have anything about messages either. No, I have to go to my inventory, create and save a note, then open up my friend list, then open up Yoe's profile and drag and drop the note into her inventory. Well, that's what the help tells you to do, but look, this seems just stupid. Or maybe I am.

And the help isn't intuitive either - the help inside SL doesn't have a search box, and the web help doesn't give you any useful results if you type something into the search box and press enter... No, you have to choose "search SL with Google" from the dropdown menu before you start getting any good results. It makes me feel thoroughly n00b.

So it takes a lot of time... I've given myself permission to do one thing a day, otherwise I'll just end up spending all my home time in front of a computer.

Posted by kolibri at 12 March 21:53, 2007
Comments
# 1 - yoe (on March 13, 2007 12:02 AM):

You're supposed to create a notecard and drag it into the mailbox... so that I can see the card in the mailbox, rather than in my inventory:) I totally agree, SL is not the most intuitive as to the user experience, the help is useless - but mostly because there can't be any general help for each item created by the users (the mailbox on my yard was kindly built and scripted by Janka).

But, surprisingly enough, there seems to be an emerging consensus on how things are supposed to work.

Hope to catch you in SL some day, so I can perhaps smooth things a bit! :)


# 2 - Janka (on March 13, 2007 03:41 AM):

You could have also dragged-and-dropped the note to the mailbox itself.


# 3 - kolibri [TypeKey Profile Page] (on March 13, 2007 07:13 PM):

I tried that but it didn't seem to work. I dragged the note on top of the box so I got a little square icon and the mailbox showed the wire structure, but when I let go it didn't give me any indication if the trick had worked or not. I decided not.


# 4 - yoe (on March 13, 2007 09:47 PM):

Well, the trick did work, I found two copies of a notecard inside the box:) Perhaps the box indeed could use some feedback ("Mailbox whispers: thank you for your notecard!") - and perhaps you could make a fortune as the user interfacing / QA -specialist in SL:D


# 5 - kolibri [TypeKey Profile Page] (on March 13, 2007 10:20 PM):

Hoho, can I say crappy interface again ;) It's not rocket science, the application needs to give me feedback... :)


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