Catznip Viewer Arrives

The Catznip Viewer is a new addition on the third party viewer (TPV) list. It offers Restrained Love in a viewer modeled closely on the Linden viewer. For new residents of Second Life and those of us who have become accustomed to the Linden Viewer over the more than 2 years of its existence, this is good news.

It offers an alternative to the Firestorm Viewer and Marine's venerable Restrained Love Viewer, along with others who have offered RLV for varying periods of time.

I've been using Catznip for about 4 months now, yes it was available before being placed on the TPV list and it works great. It became one of the recommended viewers for girls joining the Toy Slaves Brothel (RLV required) approximately 8 weeks ago and has functioned very well.

There is more to the viewer than just RLV, here's what the developers Kitty Barnett & Trinity Dejavu say about their viewer. 

"Catznip aims to refine and reinvent your window into Second Life. Our focus is stability, usability, privacy and plenty of new original home grown features.

As a project, Catznip is not and will never be a bucket list of features cherry picked from the other projects, nor a laundry list of pre-release Linden code. It’s about taking a fresh look at things and attempting to do them better.We are very open to feature ideas or requests, but please present them in the form of a use case and not simply “Add X from Viewer Y” !"

If you have followed the development of RLVa, you'll recognize Kitty as a developer of the Restrained Love used in many of the Third Party Viewers.

To read more about Catznip or to download this excellent viewer visit their website 

Catznip Viewer

Here's a short video about installing it. It's easy, no files to transfer over, just download, install and jump into Second Life. It comes with RLVa turned off. All of the viewers excepting Marine's (where it's always on) arrive with Restrained Love turned off. 

To activate it in the viewer go to Preferences (Ctrl+P), when the Preferences window opens choose the side tab labelled Catznip and place a checkmark in the box for RestrainedLove API suppoert (requires restart). The viewer will need to indeed be restarted for RLVa to take effect, so log out and then back in and you'll be in RLVa.

Watch the video in YouTube to take advantage of fullscreen and HD

Hope to see you soon in Second Life

Marine Kelley's Restrained Love Viewer

I recently did a post on setting up RLV in Firestorm. Now, for Marine Kelley's original version.

One of the most respected viewers in Second Life is Marine Kelley's RLV. Once used almost exclusively by the D/s community, residents have found lots of ways to use it.
Want to know more about RLV? See my post here...
What is Restrained Love?

Marine's follows the Linden viewer platform. This version includes the very latest user interface changes.
I've included the links to the pages used below the video.
Go ahead, don't be shy, give it a try.
Click the video and watch in full screen and 720p HD for the best experience

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/
See you soon in Second Life!

Make Firestorm Look & Feel Like Linden Labs' Viewer 2

Just my feeling that some of our residents who learned on Viewer 2 might like the magic decoder ring to help them find regular menus and the Sidebar.
Firestorm is an excellent full featured viewer. The viewer has been set with defaults that in a few cases, not many actually, look like the old viewer 1 UI that some of you won't be familiar with. I hope the video helps.
It is in HD, for best viewing click on it and watch in full screen and set to HD



The link to the Phoenix site is...
Firestorm Beta Download


The video is captioned, but, I've included the script here...
The Firestorm viewer is a feature packed user interface based on the Linden viewer 2.  It was developed by the Phoenix team, one of the most robust third party viewer providers.  Because the viewer is intended to make the transition from the old style phoenix viewer, it contains some elements that you may not be familiar with if you currently use Linden's viewer 2.

The settings that I'll demonstrate here are only recommendations. You will no doubt customize the viewer in the future. 

If you haven't already downloaded the viewer, go to http://www.phoenixviewer.com/ and choose the Firestorm Beta viewer for the platform you use.  Once you install it, we will make some changes.

On the bottom bar there are a number of icons that we can remove.  The viewer comes without a sidebar as the default.  Later, we'll learn how to choose a sidebar version.  What you take out of the bottom bar is up to you, I've removed a few things that are either repeated in the sidebar or on the top bar or seldom used.

The old viewer one interface used a pie menu and that menu comes as the default in Firestorm.  The pie menu does not exist in viewer 2, we'll learn how to change it.

Go to the Avatar (Me) menu item on the top bar, click and from the dropdown menu choose Preferences.  Now let's begin...

Under the general tab will set the away timeout to "never" and turn off UI Hints.

On the next tab "Chat" we'll turn off the typing animation and set chat to begin when we press letter keys. Turn on Group Chat pop ups if you follow any groups.

In Sound & Media, I turn off sounds, strictly a personal preference, not a recommendation.

In Network and Cache you can increase your bandwidth, if you have a strong connection. this is where you can modify the location of your chat logs, if you wish.

I like to use the arrow keys for movement, they're set in the Move & View tab.

In the Privacy tab you can set the viewer to save your chat and IM. Showing favourite LMs at login can be useful if you have favourite locations set up in landmarks.

I sometimes use the Developer and Advanced menus, they are set under the Advanced tab

Next we'll get rid of that pesky pie menu under the UI Extras and at the same time have the script dialogs stay where we're used to them by turning off the option to see them in the upper right

Now to get the Sidebar back...open the Skins tab and choose a skin with Side Tabs

Only if you use RLV, you'll see an option under the Firestorm tab to "Allow remote scripted viewer controls(RLVa)" make sure it is checked. The same option is also available under the Advanced menu, both do the same thing.

Many of the changes we've made require a viewer restart, so click Apply then OK and log out. When you log back in the changes will be in effect.