The following's crossposted from the Official Linden Blog:
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” -Ansel Adams
I’ve got great news for everyone who loves to save and share their Second Life memories via snapshots — a longtime bug which broke postcard image size and quality has been FIXED, allowing for bigger, better postcards. Previously, you were constrained to 640×480 with relatively crappy JPEG compression. Now, you can make ‘em as big as your monitor goes and crisper too, with a filesize limit of 1 MB. (We’ll be watching if this is too large and causes problems.)
I say thankee to the Lindens who made it happen; Zen, who fixed the code, let me know the good news yesterday; after Jose finished simplifying the new template, the fix went through quality assurance from Milo and Beast, and Joshua Linden pushed it live. There are more who were involved, I say thank you graciously again…
and yes, following our big Voice announcement, this comes just in time for the re-introduction of First Look: WindLight ’round the corner!
How do I send a postcard?
Watch this video:
See? It’s easy and fun!
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Will the windlight first look give us back the friends list? Those changes with the voice made me really pissed this morning, now at list my list can show four or maybe five friend at a time, and I have to use so many separate windw3os for it not to be hidden by chat. There are two windows that I might list to de attach from the communication stuff. The friends list and the main chat. I'm sorry to put this on your blog, but no one seams to ready anything on the official one, or at least never any lindens.
Will windlight come and work on Linux as well?
Torley, thanks … but part of this upg really bugs me …..
by default i'm running in 1280 x 800 .. or 8:5 ratio … when sending postcards .. especially to slpics .. i like to keep this ratio .. so that the postcard is actually what i was looking at when taking the snap …
these days for slpics sake i have to customer set the size to 50% .. or 640×400 … this way when you look at it on slpics you dont get the ugly scroll bars because the pic is so massive…
my prob is that the settings never save in SL .. so every time you take a snapshot you have to manually change the Custom size … this means no spontaneous snapshots as after manually changing you have to click the new snapshot button …
..not sure if the 'saving of the customer screen shot settings for postcard' is a bug or a feature request …either way .. would be handy …. Adec
@Nadine: My previous posts have more info on WindLight; we're going to continue to make changes to the Communicate window (after doing a whole bunch). I know how awkward it is to have not-matched-well aspect ratios for different parts of it, e.g., Friends list demands being tall but to show many IM tabs, you have to make that wide. (Which is in part why I'm a fan of vertical tab strips, as I've previously written at length about, but that's somewhat of a tangent.) We're gathering suggestions in our Issue Tracker, please see: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1076
@Adec: I can see how that's frustrating. Can you please give me exact reproduction steps? Reason I ask is because the size setting persists for me across snapshots and sessions, e.g., I can set it to 640×480, send a postcard, then send another and it'll have 640×480 still selected from the dropdown. If I relog, it stays at 640×480.
Hi Torley …
…will detail it all tomorrow .. but I think you are picking one of the default choices… 640×480 .. and yes this does stick next time you take a snap ..
if you have to manually set it .. like i do to 640×400 to keep the 8:5 aspect ratio .. then the settings dont save the next time you take a shot….
i'll do a proper 'bug/feature' detailed entry tomorrow .. now its Zzz time …
l8rs Torley…
Adec
I can confirm the size settings don't persist, while the Image Quality slider does (I have it at 95%, which is best setting for most pics imho. 100% is sooo much larger, thus takes longer to upload, thus chances of time out are higher. I used to have to wait 30-60 seconds, with 95% it's sent in 10 seconds).
Now I like to take Snaps at 16×9 ratio, I just like widescreen so much better than the standard 4×3. So I have to type in the values everytime I open the Snap window.
@Torley … added it to Jira .. http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2065
@ Daedalus …can you add your comments to Jira, and vote on it
.. thanks
Certainly Adec, I added all info I could think of
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Hi Torley - just to let you know your link to video tutorials on this blog has a broken link (https:)
Also on your youtube tutorials may I ask what tool you use to capture the tutorials? Great work!
@Adec: Thanks for reporting it, and thanks Daedalus for continuing to be such a positive force on the Issue Tracker! On closer inspection, yeah, that does look buggy to me too.
@Jo: Hm, "broken"? What happens? I should've used a regular "http://" link for that, altho the link should still work, albeit slower.
I use FRAPS to do my video capture. (And yes, I find File menu > Save Movie to Disk unrepentently unreliable and busted.)
Ah, you're very welcome, Torley.
The Issue Tracker is a great tool (though some find it too hard to use), for users, developers, open sourcers. I find bugs in a lot of the software I use. And nowadays I pity the lack of an Issue Tracker for most software in such cases. It's an informational center where everybody can read, write, link (both linking issues 'physically' and mentally).
One person can't do it, the Issue Tracker is a giant, collective brain. It allows more thinking and knowledge so compact than there has ever existed. It only has benefits, bugs can be fixed faster, more efficiently and more visible than anywhere else.
@Daed: You summed it up wonderfully there. The more people use it effectively, the more useful it becomes.