As promised in part one (and nearly broken), I have a few additional tweaks to the Viewer 2.11 interface to share. I’m not brave enough to dig underneath to change the xml code. All of these preferences can be set with the mouse.
The Buttons Menu
By default the bottom bar is full of buttons. They can take up a lot of space on a smallish (laptop) screen, making it difficult to increase the size of the local chat bar. Right-click on the bottom bar to turn as many of these off as you can. If you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, and you move your camera and avatar around with the mouse, ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT keys, you can save a bunch of bottom bar real estate by turning these off.
In fact, if you’re new to Version 2.x, I would encourage you to right click on everything in sight. There be gold in them thar clicks! Or something.
The Address Bar Menu
Right-click on the address bar to turn on parcel properties and coordinates. They look a little different from what you saw in earlier viewers, but convey basically the same information.
The Navbar Menu
With a right-click, you can turn the navbar off if you absolutely hate it. A mini-location bar can take its place. This also saves space on small screens. If you need it again for some reason, it’s easy to turn back on.
The Chat/IM Window and Icons
In my previous post on this subject I mentioned that you can show Group Chat/IMs in either tabbed or separate window modes. I’ve come to prefer the single-window view because, in my SL job, I need to post to many groups in a series. Clicking on an icon in the bottom bar will automatically open its associated group and give focus to that window’s chat input. Instead of blinking, the chat icon will display a speech bubble when there are new, unread messages waiting. The icon at the extreme right keeps a running total (up to 99) of all the unread messages.
Not pictured is yet another icon that will pop up to the right of the running total button — it looks like a mailing envelope — that will tell you when you’ve received a notice (those blue pop-down windows in earlier viewers) As I said before, right-click on everything you find… there are shortcuts to getting group info and other useful information.
I should apologize for all of the pixelization in that screen shot. I’m friends with a lot of criminal and shady-type characters.
That concludes my notes on this subject for now. I sincerely hope you found it useful or enlightening. Thanks again to Sterling (an upstanding citizen if ever there was one) for suggesting I write this up.
