Happy New Year! As you may have noticed, it's 2010, and we haven't yet shipped the project we referred to last year as "Viewer 2009". We made the decision to delay for a very good reason: It wasn't up to our standards of quality and user experience, and we simply needed more time to make it better.
A project the size of Viewer 2 (as it's now called) is a new thing for us at the Lab. We've not done much at this scale before and we've made some substantial changes to how we work in order to pull it off. Here's a bit of the back story on what we've been up to and what's coming soon.Focus on the New User and First Hour ExperienceHere's a sobering statistic: Over 50% of new Residents who register and download the Second Life viewer log in once and never come back a second time. We've made it way too hard for a new user to absorb all the wonderfulness that is Second Life.With Viewer 2, our revamped web site, a new Orientation Island and much more, we've taken a step back and tried to create an end-to-end experience that will be much more compelling and relevant for a new Resident. There's still more to do, but we believe we've made a pretty dramatic step forward.But what about existing Residents?When Viewer 2 ships, some current Residents will find it frustrating. While we have kept almost all existing functionality, the UI has changed dramatically. It looks different. Menus have moved. There are new ways of interacting and communicating. If you've come to know and love the existing user interface, it may be a challenging transition.Other Residents will embrace the new UI. It is more consistent and discoverable. The look is more polished and professional. Our UI team, along with our outside design partners 80/20 Studio took a fresh look at the entire interface, with the goal of making Second Life more immediately relevant and compelling. We worked very closely with a core set of Residents to make sure that we were making design choices that would enhance the experience. Sometimes we got it exactly right and sometimes they sent us back to the drawing board. We also did several rounds of formal usability testing with both new users and existing Residents. We took all of this feedback to heart and it helped us make Viewer 2 even better.The current viewer, version 1.23, will not go away any time soon. In the earliest case, following the policy T described here, 1.23 will be around until 30 days after we ship Viewer 2.1 (our first update to the new viewer), about a quarter after delivery of Viewer 2. Even then, there will continue to be open source viewers based on the 1.23 code base available for users who wish to continue using them.Open Source is a Big DealLike previous viewers, Viewer 2 will be released to open source. We've got a bit of work to do to rebase Snowglobe off of the Viewer 2 code base and merge in Snowglobe changes, but we're on it.Open Source is a big deal for us. What the adoption of open source viewers has made clear is that many Residents want a high-end "power user" experience. We know we can't do it all. We can't at the same time work towards expanding our user base to a broader, consumer market and address all of the needs of our high-end Residents. We need help from our robust, passionate developer community to develop "power user" and more niche market viewers.Of course, there are lots of other great reasons for our Open Source efforts, but they are beyond the scope of this note. For example, we're working with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to establish broad standards for virtual worlds, starting with formal definitions of the region and agent domains, a.k.a. VWRAP. Open Source is a key tenet of this work.We've stepped up our Open Source efforts and will continue to support the development community as best we can. For example, we've been meeting regularly with the Emerald team and are supportive of their development of a viewer that meets the needs of many long-time Residents.We're also keenly aware that a few bad actors are using open source viewer code to create viewers that enable functionality that violates our terms of service or enables intellectual property theft. As Cyn describes here, with our Third Party Viewer Policy our intent is to list viewers that comply with new guidelines and policies so that Residents can make informed choices about which viewer to use. At the same time, we will be taking aggressive action against developers that don't comply with these guidelines.New Ways of Working == Better SoftwareIf you're a software development geek, you might be interested to know that we're in the thick of a substantial transition in how we build software. Most of our teams have moved to a Scrum-inspired model, keeping iterations short, quality high and working off of a clearly prioritized product backlog.We've also built a new test automation team, and are building an automated test suite to help catch performance and functional regressions before they make it to Residents. Our automated "Crash Reporter" helps us find and fix all but the most obscure crashers. If we've done our jobs well (and I think we have), Viewer 2 should be the most stable SL Viewer ever. We've got lots more to do and you'll continue to see even more stable software, more regular updates, and fewer regressions. In other words, our goal is to deliver software that Just Works.Coming Soon: Viewer 2 Public BetaWe're still putting the finishing touches on Viewer 2 and will be pulling the covers off very soon -- we hope in February. Watch this blog for an announcement. Of course, Viewer 2 is just the beginning, not the end. There is much more to do. Our plan is for Viewers 2.1 and 2.2 to follow along in much shorter order than it took to get Viewer 2 out the door. We're currently targeting quarterly high-quality releases, and with the changes we've made to how we build software, we've got a very good shot of achieving that goal.Did we get it all right with Viewer 2? No. Is it a substantial leap forward in the discoverability and usability of our Viewer? Yes, I think it is. And I hope you will too. Stay tuned...