Early this year, Linden Lab released the source for the Second Life
viewer. Programmers can download the source, make changes, and even add features and improvements by submitting changes that we incorporate in the main viewer. By the time we release our next viewer, we’ll have enjoyed hundreds of submissions from over fifty contributors, and we couldn’t be more thankful. (Thank you!)

This success has been encouraging, and we’re now opening the source of two key components in our web services infrastructure: Eventlet, and Mulib.

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We’ve posted a refreshed Focus Beta to the downloads page. We made the minimum changes in order to get it compatible with the main grid again, and also fixed some of the more egregious bugs while we were at it. Don’t remember what the focus beta is? Check the previous post to refresh your memory.

The feedback we’ve been getting from this beta viewer has been great. The survey results have been very valuable to us, especially the well-written comments. We’ve also seen a lot of bugs reported via the bug reporter, some small, some large. All together, it’s really helped us make positive changes (most of which, sadly, don’t make it into this particular refresh, but you’ll see them soon). Great work, everyone! Thanks for helping us make Second Life better!

The (short) release notes follow:

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Richard and I have been working on improving the keyboard interaction in the viewer, and this beta is your chance to see what we’ve come up with.

Remember Joshua’s post about how we’re going to start distributing beta viewers that connect to the main grid? Well, this is one of those! This viewer is a beta but, unlike the beta test grid, it connects to the main grid and everything you do is as real as it ever gets. It won’t be downloaded automatically as part of the auto-update process, so when we release a new viewer version to the public, you’ll have to re-download the beta.

Grab it from here!

We’re releasing a beta viewer like this to collect feedback from you, the residents. After playing around with it, make sure to follow the survey link that we’ve put on the login screen to let us know what you think.

Release notes follow…
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