Today we’re excited to announce that the new Communications Hub User Interface (CHUI) is now a part of the main Second Life Viewer. The update should download automatically, or you can download the new Viewer here.

will help you get started with what’s new:

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What is CHUI?

As we’ve previously blogged about, CHUI puts Second Life’s communications tools in a more flexible UI that lets you customize it for the ways you prefer to communicate inworld. You can even turn it all off when you want to build, make movies, or simply be left alone for a while.

With CHUI, you can:

Add participants to a conversation already in progress

See all of your conversations and everyone in those conversations, using an inventory-like UI

Quickly move your voice connection between conversations and effortlessly adjust individual volume or overall volume in a single click

View all of your recent communications in one window (Conversation Log)

See what was said in any conversation (Conversation Transcripts)

Set Do Not Disturb to focus on other things and get all the communications (and inventory offers!) you missed, after you come back

Choose from four levels of notification for each of five different kinds of incoming communication. You can set IMs from friends and IMs from non-friends to different levels of notification

Turn sound on and off for four different events, such as inventory offers and teleport offers

Access voice morphs more easily

Get to chat preferences and privacy preferences directly from the Conversations window.

Type your chats into an expanding, multiple-line box

Select multiple users across different conversations and start a new conference with them

Choose which conversations are in their own windows, and which should be in a tabbed window -- you can have both now.

Collapse any conversation to a single-line input with popup messages.

See users and objects you have blocked in a new tab in the People window.

How do you use CHUI?

There are a lot of ways to use the new communications features, and we hope you’ll take the time to explore. We know a new interface can be frustrating while you figure out how to do the things you’re used to doing, but

should help everyone get up to speed quickly.

To all those who helped beta test CHUI, thank you for all the great feedback you have given us along the way, which was incredibly valuable and helpful during the development cycle. Your input is truly appreciated, and we will, of course, continue to improve on this feature in future releases.