Notification Project Viewer May Save You Time

I have had to go to some very dark corners of Second Life to create this blog post, very dark, the lengths I go to in order to get the right shots!

In a virtual world far far away, Aki Shichiroji pointed out that notifications in Second Life were untidy and not well organised, especially for people who receive a lot of notifications. I can’t quote Aki directly because the original Jira post has now gone dark. This is because the issue has been resolved in many ways.

How has the issue been resolved, I hear you ask, well Linden Lab yesterday announced, New Project Viewer: Get Your Notifications Sorted :

The Notifications Project Viewer is an improvement for sorting your notifications. This new feature is based on your feedback: a notifications floater with four tabs sorting your incoming notifications into System, Transactions, Invitations, and Groups and allowing better interaction with them as well. Those who deal with high volumes of money transactions, group notices, group invites, or inventory transfers now have a better way to review their messages and identify which notices need immediate attention.

I’ll try and explain what is changing, with some screenshots.

So on logging in, after clicking the chat bubble which alerted me that I had notifications I see the above. Now I can see that I have four tabs, one for System messages, one for Transactions, one for Invitations and one for Group notices. At a glance I can see I have one System message and 25 Group notices. Now I have a choice here on which notices I consider to be the most important. A merchant may want to pay more attention to any transactions first, whilst someone awaiting a group invitation may want to look at that first.

The messages default to collapsed, to expand them, you just click the downward arrow :

Now I can see the full message, in this case, that I’ve received too many notifications and my instant messages were capped.

There are some extra things to look out for, which are well exemplified when looking at group notifications.

The messages are collapsed, but if I look at the top message I can see a paper clip. This is the standard icon to inform people that there’s an attachment, which I can see when I press the downward arrow :

A notecard was attached to that message, which I can now see and open if I want to. Alternatively, if I’m already pretty sure that I pretty much know what these messages contain, I can delete all. A word of warning here, delete all does not prompt you to ask it you’re sure, they will all be deleted. However it’s only the messages under the tab you’re looking at that will be deleted.

Invitations are where matters got murky. I went grid hopping looking for an auto inviter. They seem to be everywhere when you don’t want them. I had to visit an adult location to find one, ok it was a strip club and I almost teleported in right on the stage next to a dancer, but it was all for a good cause :

Invitations work the same way as other notifications, you can expand or collapse them and you have the option to delete them all.

Now a very important point to note is that this is a project viewer and you may experience some bugs. Linden Lab welcome feedback and you can provide that feedback here : https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG

Overall this looks like a good change to me. This will probably be popular with people who get a lot of offline messages, particularly merchants, as the ability to prioritise what’s important in this fashion is likely to aid workflow.