[UPDATE - 11:44 AM PDT] You can get tFinder inworld @ Wallaroo (250, 11, 304). Look for something like this:

I keep long wishlists of people, places, things I hope to see come true in Second Life: some already have.  One that found me in particularly good graces was after Pompo Bombacci (thanks Pompo!) let me know about Cid Vilas' tFinder.

What's it do? First, let's start with some numbers: while I write this, the tFinder is the #1-selling item on SL Exchange. It's also got 130 votes averaging out at 4.5 numbers, and 17 member reviews. Those of you who know me, also know I place context around metrics. In this instance, what makes it so compelling?

One sentence: texture organization is hell.

Another sentence: opportunists in this field will find ample voids to fill.

And Cid Vilas is such — in the parlance du Torley — a chess player.

Ever since my early days of admiring the work of others to crafting my own Torley Textures, I've run into all the common pitfalls of managing textures in my inventory. For example, no built-in way to thumbnail preview a swath of textures: you have to open them up one-by-one, eating up full memory for each, which also reduces performance. Also, since we don't have an actual tagging system, you may have something named:

03Brk.jpg

and not have the damndest idea what that is by name! I resort to "ghetto tags", which is usually inserting keywords after a filename such as:

03Brk.jpg [WOOD TREE OLD]

if not altogether renaming the file into something human-readable like:

Old wooden tree bark

Before I jaunt further with ya, let me preface that tFinder doesn't solve tangles with cryptic filenames, but if you've named textures appropriately before including them in the database — send them to Cid for now; in the future this will be more open — then you can find them.

A brief diversion: when I send SL snapshots to Flickr, in the subject or description, I often put keywords I know will make sense to me later, so I can find something straight outta the archives. On so many instances, a fellow Linden or Resi will ask me about something I've seen on my travels, I need to pull it up — fast!

That's certainly why I've adopted a good habit of taking a few moments beforehand to optimize information retrieval later.

And now, the meat of this story is that I IMed Cid, he sent me the tFinder, we met inworld to discuss. tFinder costs L$10, which is the price of uploading a single texture to begin with, and presently banner ad-supported, which some will find intrusive, but for the price it's cheap & cheery, and ah, context: Cid didn't know this would be so popular! Some of the background behind it is that he likes to choose intriguing projects, and he was thinking about P2P networks. In Second Life, which is decidedly very conducive to social activity, what sort of things are easily swapped? We know freebies are, but looking at it on a more granular level, textures are micro-art — my adherent philosophy. And if they sit in your inventory, they're not doing much else unless you apply them, or share them. Sharing textures augments their usage.

tFinder basically works like this: you click a button, type in a word or two (it does substring matches so searching for "col" may turn up "Colorful Mattress"), and it shows you thumbnail previews (shrunken-down versions of the originals, so they don't conserve graphics card memory, but are easier to visualize). Click on one, the full thing pops up, and you can save it to inventory like any standard texture you receive.

I did several casual searches., and was pleased to find Torley Textures in the current database. Cid clued me in that the collection was drawn from available free packs present at places like sandboxes, newcomer-friendly venues, etc. Looking at some of the prefixes appended to my textures such as "AB -", it was apparent they came from Harbinger's Haven. I spotted some dupes, and then proceeded to engage Cid in dialogue with feature suggestions like:

• What about a way to automatically remove dupes?
• How about adding the ability to search by creator name?
• A reskinning contest for the HUD, done by some of the Grid's most talented texturers?
• A community-driven tagging system?
• Top lists of the most popularly-downloaded textures?

Clearly, I'm excited about what already exists in the present. When I last checked, Cid didn't have an inworld place to acquire the tFinder yet, but I got a preview of his new prototype. I mused about distro'ing Torley Textures from a tFinder server in the future. And in the process, began to ruminate about a "texture culture" where swarms of textures, like a collective of insects or a flock of geese, congregate together and are distributed over the fattening texture pipelines of Second Life. Need a wood, metal, glass, etc. texture but are too lazy — or simply efficient — to rummage inworld? Call up the tFinder and see what kind of good times are in store for you.

As I often hark towards (this should be disclaimer text appended to just about all I write, albeit not boring), this is but a seed of what's yet to come. I thrill at experiencing what could be the germination of great growths to go — so now is early in the process when I can see the potential, and share it with you, so that we may mutually benefit.

As part of a flourishing open source texture movement, I encourage more Residents of Second Life to take up their tools and imbue the world with a unique beauty that it didn't know before; textures specially inspired by SL, which didn't exist prior to your knowledge of it, which may find their way to the outside, instead of the other way around. Don't know where to start? Give my fave Filter Forge a 90-day trial. Viva les textures!

Gracious thanx to Cid Vilas for taking the time to demo tFinder for me, and heck, inventing it!