[sldev] RE: Landmarks and Navigation Update 2008-05-29

[Kitty]

>* To create a history of locations visited, presented in some visual
fashion

I looked through the PDFs and the emails and I only found a reference to
"teleport history" so it would seem that the history is populated only from
point-to-point teleporting and nothing else?

The analogy between SL and a web browser breaks down because you only really
have one way of navigating the web which is to click links. In SL that
translates to tp'ing, but you can also simply wander around without tp'ing.

As an illustrative example: someone hears about the new Bay City sims and
decides to go have a look. They use a landmark or the map to teleport over
and some time (potentially hours) after that they tp away again. They could
find a lot of places they might want to visit again and forgot to landmark -
or didn't realize they wanted to visit again - in between those two tp's.

Parcel-to-parcel tracking (probably would have to based on a "user definable
time spent on that parcel" to avoid clutter) would seem a lot more useful
than only tracking tp's. We already have a crude teleport history right now
and I don't find it very useful since it offers no history of where I went,
only the place I tp'ed away from.

The web analogy would be browsing pictures on Flickr and instead of having a
history of each picture you looked at, it would just tell you "you looked at
the Flickr site" with nothing more specific than that.

What I would love as a history would be a trajectory overlayed on a sim map,
with points where I stopped for several minutes highlighted as potential
reference points. Having only a SLURL to Bliss Gardens isn't that useful for
instance since it's a dozen connected sims consisting of sim sized parcels
and it would take forever to wander and find what you saw the day before;
being able to literally retrace your steps visually would be invaluable in
finding things again easily.

>Clicking the back or forward button will automatically 
>teleport the Resident back/forward in their location history.

We have a setting that determines whether double clicking a landmark
automatically teleports you or whether it pops up a confirmation dialog. I
personally like having the confirmation since misclicks do happen.

>Address Bar - The address bar will display a SLURL by default. 
>Users can enter a SLURL, or Region name in their Inventory.

Is "region name in inventory" a typo for "landmark name in inventory"?

If the browser analogy has to be made, I would expect to be able to type
"Shiny Things" there and have it fetch the location from the recent history
or landmarks with an auto-complete drop down.

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I'm not sure if I missed it, but where is all the extra metadata stored?

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I don't mean to sound all negative :|. It's obvious a lot of work and effort
went into planning this and working all of it out and creating prototypes
and it'll undoubtably to useful to some people, but overall the new
management UI seems rather complicated and clumsy to me compared to ordering
landmarks in inventory which is something that everyone in SL already knows
how to do and I hope it's something that can be turned off.