We wanted to update you on the continuing improvements we are making to Second Life. We have recently released fixes that improve the user experience and performance. Here’s a quick progress update on some of the projects we’ve been working on:

CHUI Beta Viewer

We’ve made lots of changes to streamline and improve your experience communicating with others in Second Life. CHUI (the Communications Hub User Interface) is getting ready for primetime. When we last blogged about it, CHUI was only in a Project Viewer; now it’s available as a Beta Viewer, and the next step will be rolling it out to everyone as part of the main Second Life Viewer.
The big goals of CHUI are:

• Bring all communication functions and conversation text into a single window
• Provide a single notification system, with more detailed user controls
• Stop losing IMs -- keep a log of all conversations, including attempted conversations and IMs received while not logged in
• View chat transcripts inside the Viewer, and control them more easily
• Replace Busy mode with Do Not Disturb mode, a richer and more consistent feature

Check out the overview video or go to the forum post for more details.

If you are unable to view the embedded video, you can view it here.

Region Crossing

We have made several improvements to region crossing that allow a smoother transition between regions, instead of the jerky transition some users experienced in the past. This change also reduces the rate of teleport failure rate. This went out the full grid on January 25, 2013. Since that date, the number of reported teleport failures has dropped by 91%.

Email Updates on Marketplace

A new version of Marketplace was released on February, 5, 2013, which adds new emails and provides the ability to opt out of each type of email. This will allow Merchants and Shoppers to be better informed about Marketplace activity -- or choose not to be notified at all. In addition, infrastructure changes were made to improve reliability of email delivery.

Cocoa Project Viewer

The Cocoa Project Viewer has updates to streamline development and improve Viewer performance on a Mac. Check out the new full screen mode and more.

Coming Soon

Wondering what’s next for Second Life? Here are a few things you can expect to see soon:

• We will have a Project Viewer for the Normal and Specular Mapping project for content creators to try out.
• More performance improvements are in the queue as well, specifically related to threaded object rezzing.

As we hit milestones, we’ll post updates on these and other projects in the works that will help make Second Life better and better. In the meantime, whether you’re experimenting with Project and Beta Viewers, shopping or selling on the Marketplace, or just exploring and having fun inworld, we hope you’ll start to notice the impact of our initiatives to improve your Second Life experience.