The list of changes and features from the original Second Life® viewer is on Henri Beauchamp’s website.
Dolphin Viewer differs from Henri’s Snowglobe-based Cool VL Viewer as follows:
- The Sailor’s Mini Map:
- Physical prims (for example vehicles) appear green if they are owned by you, or red if they are owned by others (See screenshot below).
- Phantom prims are rendered transparent (if it’s phantom it doesn’t bother you when you’re sailing).
- An additional checkbox in Preferences to rotate the Minimap or not.
- A setting in Preferences to set the maximum size for prims to show on the Minimap.
- Desktop notifications (requires libnotify, see below) using libnotify on linux, growl on Windows.
- A checkbox for the DoubleClickAutoPilot in Snowglobe.
- Hotkey for Snapshot to Disk changed to ctrl-shift-D to make it actually usable on non-english keyboards.
- Avatar Name in the window title only shows after you successfully connect to the grid.
- Notification in chat when someone within draw distance takes a snapshot.
- Inventory ‘worn’ tab shows active gestures.
- Inventory has Collapse, Expand and Quick Filters (from Phoenix).
- Several settings, normally only accessible through the Advanced Menu, are under Preferences -> Advanced.
For a complete list of changes and features, see the Patches page.
The Sailor’s Mini Map.
The preferences tab for the Sailor’s Minimap:
Desktop notifications:
Dolphin Viewer can use desktop notifications to tell you about incoming IMs and such things even when you have the application minimized or on a different desktop (new in 19a, see the downloads page).
For this to work you need libnotify installed. Most up-to-date linux desktop environments such as KDE or gnome already use that, so you shouldn’t have to worry about it. If Dolphin crashs on startup with a message like “libnotify: not found” or similar, use your distribution’s software manager to install it.
Here’s a screenshot of what those notifications will look like:
The desktop notifier code was found in emerald beta, and thus is (c) Modular Systems. Bugfixes to it are (c) by me and realesed under GPLv2. Seriously… a timeout for 5 milliseconds for those notifications??? What is the point?