Inara Pey recently blogged some sad news regarding the Radegast viewer for Second Life and Opensim. Inara linked to a post from the main developer behind Radegast, Latif Khalifa, in which Latif typed :
It saddens me to have to inform you that I won’t be able to continue work on Radegast or my other opensource projects. My health has been deteriorating over the past few years to this point where my use of computers is down to just a few minutes daily. Not being able to work for several years bring its own set of problems.
Radegast is opensource so if there is interest people could continue improving it.
It’s been a great pleasure working with the Radegast and the wider Second Life communities.
The Radegast viewer won’t be as familiar to people as some of the more popular third party viewers for virtual worlds. That is largely because Radegast is a lightweight client that contains some enhanced accessibility features such as text to speech, which makes it a client that people with visual difficulties may embrace and therefore join virtual world communities.
There’s certainly room in virtual worlds for lightweight clients, even if they don’t come with accessibility features. People may just want to check in when they are on the go, so I don’t think this means the end of the road for lightweight clients and it certainly won’t be the end of the road for clients built with accessibility in mind.
The Radegast code is opensource, so other people can continue to improve if if they please. Latif had also been working on the Replex viewer, which is based on the code from the Singularity viewer. I’ve ran into Latif more than once inworld, he used to attend office hours when they were quite a big thing. Well actually I used to attend office hours, I think Latif kept going to them after they had morphed into something else.
Latif has been a strong voice in terms of opensource development and virtual worlds in general. Hopefully this isn’t the end of Latif’s involvement in virtual communities completely.
I wish Latif all the best for the future and hope to hear from him at some point when he’s feeling well enough to talk.