Monthly Archives: January 2011

Dolphin Viewer 2 2.4.0.13926

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It’s finally there!

After countless hours of work, today marks the first official release of the Dolphin Viewer 2 (version 2.4.0.13926) for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Based on the Linden Lab viewer 2.4 source code, Dolphin Viewer 2 has quite a few additional features and modifications, that, in my opinion make it substantially improved over the official viewer.

I look forward to your feedback and/or feature requests – just head over to the Dolphin Viewer forum to put in your two cents worth.

The downloads are on the download page, as usual.

A few thoughts about the future.

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The second poll about the options for the future of the Dolphin Viewer closed with roughly 2/3 of voters in favor of a 2.x-based Dolphin Viewer.

So here’s the way it’ll be for the foreseeable future:

  • My personal efforts for developing new features and additions will focus on 2.x source code only.
  • For the foreseeable future, I will try to support both Dolphin Viewer 1.5 and Dolphin Viewer 2.
  • If at some point I find that I cannot handle the workload of supporting two separate viewers, Dolphin Viewer 1.5 will be “frozen” at that point and no further updates will be made. As long as there are no untoward developments from my hoster’s side the downloads for Dolphin Viewer 1.5 will stay online.
  • If at some point Linden Lab decides to block viewers based on 1.5 source, then Dolphin Viewer 1.5 will cease to be updated and maintained.

Dolphin Viewer 1.5.43.3627

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Dolphin Viewer 1.5.43.3627 is out.

New in this release:

1. Version checking on startup:

  • On startup, the Dolphin Viewer compares it’s version with the latest release version number stored on the server, and shows a popup if they don’t match.
  • No data is stored anywhere during this process.

2. RestrainedLove updated to 2.4.0

Downloads are on the download page as usual.

First poll results & Dolphin Viewer’s future

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The results of the first poll about the future of the Dolphin Viewer are in:

  • 5 persons voted for “Stay with 1.5 sourcecode and interface”
  • 11 persons voted for “Switch to 2.x code and interface”
  • 8 people voted for “Provide both versions”

Over the past weeks, I have been giving a lot of thought to the direction that the development of the Dolphin Viewer should take.

First, the sheer amount of work to support both 1.5 (based on Snowglobe) and 2.x code is way more than one person can handle – as you guys may know, there is only one person behind the scenes at Dolphin. So there is a new poll, which has the same question, but no “Both” choice.

Second, development on Snowglobe stopped sometime in the summer of 2010, and the official sourcecode repository for it is no longer available, nor are the supporting libraries and supporting files. Additionally, I had a few open JIRA entries about issues related to shared media that simply do not work properly. Last night, they were all closed, with a message ‘Wontfix, Snowglobe 1.x is dead now’.

My personal choice is to move forward with Dolphin 2.x. I have been using my internal test build almost exclusively in the last few weeks, and I am really happy with it. I encourage you to try it – so far there is only a Linux version, but the Windows and Mac versions will follow soon.