During the first part of the year, Linden Lab spent some time working on a new installer for Second Life. Development seemed to halt in April, but it is still a rather interesting little tool.
Weighing in at a measly 350KB under Windows, the application downloads, installs, then runs the much larger Second Life viewer, and does so quite quickly and painlessly while displaying an assortment of positive marketing messages. The whole process takes a couple of minutes, depending on your network connection.
The marketing bites, akin to Microsoft's Windows setup, are obviously targeted at first-time users. What's interesting about that is the impression they seem to give to new users.
(forgive a few graphical glitches in the images below. That's an artifact of the screenshots and not of the installer)
Having tried it out on a couple victims... err, novices, the impression received is that Linden Lab is addressing the new user with these texts. That's not unexpected of course. What is interesting is the impression the pronouns give in a couple of spots.
"Hey. I thought Linden Lab didn't run any events. It says they have their own events page."
"They mean the user-run events."
"Oh. Well, it should say 'the' events page then."
We can't argue with that.
There's also what looks like a careful sidestep, avoiding referring to the Linden Dollar as a currency or medium of exchange. However, referring to it as a unit of trade puts it on the same legal footing as calling it a currency, so we can't quite fathom why.
The last version we saw of this project was back in April, where after a fairly short development cycle it appeared to have reached its final form. We got our hands on it when the automatic build system posted it to a public Web-server, as usual, and tried out pretty much every revision as development progressed. The final build was set up to install viewer 1.22.
Quite why this painless little tool hasn't seen any release is a good question.
"Real businesses", you know, as opposed to those fake ones.
