The most immediate change visible in the floater is the inclusion of buttons for the share to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr options.
Again, this still appears to be a work-in-progress, given the lack of a preview panel for viewing snaps, but what is there is likely to get some people bouncing in their seats. Niran has undertaken a complete overhaul of the snapshot floater. As with the other buttons on the floater, note that each spacer can only be displayed (used) the once. Like the toolbar buttons, these can be dragged and dropped into any of the toolbar areas and used to break-up the buttons displayed within it into groups. Additional “spacer” buttons in the Black Dragon Toolbar Buttons floater can be used break-up buttons in a toolbar into logical groupsĪnother interesting / useful little extra is the addition of five “spacer” buttons to the Toolbar button floater. Given the nature of the viewer, I’m not pointing to either item a fault, but rather something to be aware of should you try the viewer yourself and encounter similar oddities. By default, the Navigation & Favourites bar are enabled, but for me, the Navigation Bar didn’t display the region name or any details, and toggling to the Mini-location Bar caused it clash with the toolbar buttons, suggesting more work needs to be done in integrating the two sets of functions. It’s an interesting approach, and bearing in mind the current release is experimental, not entirely trouble-free, for me at least. Right-clicking on these buttons displays the expected button options menu, and buttons can still be dragged and placed on the left or right of the screen or at the bottom of the screen, according to your own preference. The buttons are displayed in a new size of “Tiny”, and are immediately followed by the Dragon menu option, which provides access to the expected drop-down of menus (File, Edit View, World, etc). The new top bar arrangement in Black Dragon includes the ability to set-up toolbar buttons “in” the top bar, ranged to the left of the Black Dragon drop-down menu which accesses the familiar menu options (“Dragon”) This displays buttons where one would, in any other v3-based viewer, expect to find the Me, Comm, World, etc., menu options. The most noticeable element of this version of the viewer when run for the first time, is new button placement area at the top left of the screen. The result is quite striking, but at the same time I wonder how those with visual impairments will find the viewer at first glance. The UI changes are immediately apparent on launching the viewer: the UI has moved more to a black schema, and system messages, etc., are by default in red. The majority of the changes this time around are within the UI, although the version does pick-up on some new shiny from LL, notably the SL Share 2 capabilities for uploading text and photos to Twitter and photos to Flickr.Īgain, this isn’t intended as an in-depth review of the viewer, more a look at some of the highlights and give some initial feedback.
It is also billed as a part-way release between the 2.3 and 2.4 versions of the viewer. The release is marked as “experimental”, and so some caution is advised in using it. On Friday May 16th, Black Dragon 2.3.9.8 was released on the world.