Just as I pushed out the weekly Viewer round-up, Kitty and the gang slipped out Catznip R6, which nicely compliments (and perhaps complements!) R5. My timing sucketh.

R6, based on LL 3.2.7 code, is a maintenance release that fixes a range of bugs and gives Group management some love and attention and well as adding other nibbles to enjoy.

Changes to Group Notices

If you’re constantly pushing out Group Notices, you’re liable to like this. You can now create a Group Notice without having to open Group information first. Simply display your Group list (COMMUNICATE->GROUPS or CTRL-SHIFT-G), right-click on the name of the Group for which you wish to create a notice and select CREATE NOTICE. You can still create Notices in the usual way as well – via the Group information floater itself, but the menu option is liable to be a timesaver.

Nor does it end there. Rather than being confined to the Group floater, the Create Notice option now gets a floater of its own, meaning that when used with the new menu short cut, less screen real estate is used-up. All the functionality associated with raising a Group Notice is retained, and the floater can be resized to suit your needs while writing.

Viewing a Group’s archive of Notices is now also easier, thanks to another addition to the contact menu: simply right-click on a Group in your list and select VIEW NOTICES to immediately display the history of recent Notices for the Group in the Group floater.

Staying the Groups, the Group toast has been reworked for greater clarity with:

The details of the notice sender and Group are now displayed on separate lines and are clickable – clicking the Group name will open the Group’s profile; clicking the sender’s name will open their personal profile

The number of visible lines in the Notice has been increased from 7 to 10 for better readability

The date is displayed in a smaller font to provide better separation between it and the notice title and the main body of text.

Finally, Groups get a handful of bug fixes, as detailed in the release notes.

Windlight Updates

R6 brings with it additional Windlight options and a nicely cleaned-up list (WORD->ENVIRONMENT SETTINGS->CUSTOMIZE MY ENVIRONMENT->FIXED SKY) which includes creators’ attributions wherever possible, which is a nice acknowledgement to see. TBH, I can’t specify which of the list are new – as I’ve never actually looked at what was there to start with in Catznip (shame on me, I know), but the release notes refers to them as a “huge stack”, so there should be a lot for regulars to enjoy.

Elsewhere there are nips and tucks – the delay that may be experienced when right-clicking and . or editing an object has gone, so menus, etc. immediately respond, issues around the multi-line chat freezing the word view have been corrected, etc.

Chat also sees any character opening the chat bar or focusing on Nearby Chat when WASD is set to start typing. All I can say on that is “Three cheers!” As someone who has her WASD set for typing rather than movement, the tendency for some Viewers to ignore various keys has been a source of considerable teeth-grinding…

As updates go, this may well appear to be a small one, but it again demonstrates that Catznip remains highly innovative in examining how people actually use the Viewer and its UI on a daily basis and in seeking ways and means to make common tasks easier to access and get on with.

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