SLeek is fixed! and improved

Well, following my last blog entry bemoaning the fact that SLeek had been broken by the recent changes to SecondLife, I am pleased to say that the latest version has fixed the problems and is better than ever!

You can find details of the update and download here

As I have said before, using SLeek is a bit like being blind - you can "hear" the people around you, and you are aware that they are there - but you have no idea what they look like, or where they are relative to yourself. You also don't know where you are or what your avatar is doing. In my case, when I used SLeek earlier this evening, apparently I'd been "Ruthed", so instead of being an "elder geek" - a man with long white hair and a beard, I looked like this....



(Team is the one with the short hair in the foreground... demonstrating that it is important to make sure your avatar is always wearing clean underwear!)

Thanks to my friend Aleister Kronos for taking the photo (though I think he was just enjoying letting me know how daft I looked!)

Back to SLeek though.....
The interface works... though I made the mistake of forgetting to select "use last location" rather than "use Home location" when I logged in. This meant I materialised in one of the welcome islands rather than in the nice safe place I left my avatar the last time I logged out! However, fortunately the teleport works, & I was able to spirit myself away to meet Aleister and his friends on the Comcast island.

I was also pleased to see that it is now possible to pull down the user profile of the people around you... so at least (when people had put their photo in their profiles) I was able to get a idea of who I was speaking to!

There is also a neat map viewer.... give it the name of a location and it will bring up the thumbnail map. Unfortunately there's a bug in the libsecondlife library, so it always reports that there are no people in every area!

Still, the interface works - chat works; IM works; teleporting works. It also has the option of connecting to the beta and teen grids (though I haven't tried these out).

I can certainly recommend SLeek to anyone who would like a chat/im interface into SL and doesn't quite have the graphics horsepower to run the full interface (in my case, my home PC will run SL with no problem, but my "company laptop" doesn't stand a chance with full-blown SL). Thanks again to to Delta for updating the code.