CHUI Hits The Main Viewer

Linden Lab have announced that CHUI is now part of the main viewer and will appear either by automatic update or when people update to the latest release of the main viewer. This is likely to be a Marmite issue for many, with people loving or hating it, although for me, I sort of like it, unlike Marmite, which should be illegal.

CHUI (Communication Hub User Interface) has pro’s and cons, one of the cons is that it takes up a lot of screen real estate. This is fine when you’re chatting away but when you’re roleplaying or getting immersive, it gets in the way and when you minimise it, you can easily lose track of what messages are arriving, although over time you’ll get used to it.

I’ve been using CHUI for quite some time, first in the form of the project viewer and then in the form of it being incorporated in the beta viewer. Over that time it has undoubtedly been improved, the issue with local chat not staying undocked being one major improvement, but there are issues with it that I still find irksome.

There are some good pro’s with it, the way you can view chat history being a really big improvement, no longer do you need to search through your hard drive for those old chat logs, once you’ve im’d someone, the viewer allows you to view a chat history. I’m not sure why you need to im someone for this to work, once im’d the setting sticks, you don’t need to im them again to view chat history.

The blurb from LL tells us that 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.

Lots of nice features and with there being so many, lots you’ll never use, but the features you might not use, might appeal to someone else, so in that regard it’s good.

I’d definitely suggest that you play around with the notification settings to see which one suits your workflow best, some of the settings irritated the life out of me, but there are choices there, so that’s good, find one you like.

Now this is quite a change and to aid users, LL have provided a help video:

Let’s not deceive ourselves here though, whereas there are nice new features, some people are going to absolutely hate it, that’s the nature of a change such as this, it is quite a big change to how chat previously worked. However please try and give it time, there are definitely plus points.

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