I’m happy to announce some very exciting news today: Rod Humble is Linden Lab’s new CEO. Our press release is here. You’ll hear from Rod himself after he starts in mid-January, but in the meantime, we wanted to share a brief introduction.

What a great event! The week-long Winterfest event, which wrapped up Saturday, December 18th, was the first of what we hope will be many collaborative events with partner communities—and we’re so pleased with the results. From winter sports to live music, Winterfest offered a good time for all.

We especially enjoyed the Residents vs. Lindens snowball fights. We saw some very creative snow weaponry this year! There’s nothing better for a Linden than getting pummeled with snow-fire to remind you of how fun it is to spend time with the Second Life community.

Big Thanks to Everyone Who Made Winterfest Such a Success!

Winterfest would not have been possible without the fabulous people from the Global Online Hockey Association (GOHA), who generously hosted the activities on their six regions. Thank you to the organizers and community of GOHA, who made Winterfest such a wonderful experience and who helped Residents to discover the many delights of the season, including the Maze, Scavenger/Puck Hunt, Snowman Building Contest, and new player training. In particular, we’d like to thank Winterfest organizers Jack Belvedere, Katia Ixtab, Ashlene McMinnar, Marjan Tomba, Dyz Warburton, Kalita Magic, Tangle Giano, Lobo Rodriquez, Janieke Blanchard, and Anhayla Lycia. Special thanks go to Marjan Tomba for the popular new ski jump and Lancelot Skytower for the fantastic balloon tours across the sims.

In addition, we are so pleased that many SL artists, musicians, and DJs donated their time and talents to the event. And thank you, TreetTV, for coming out to support and to help spread the word.

The full list of our thanks can be found on the Winterfest wiki page.

Still Time to Have Wintry Fun!

In case you were so busy with the RL holidays that you missed these SL holiday activities, there’s still time to get in some wintry fun! GOHA is keeping many of the Winterfest activities going in the Chamonix City area, and plans to add even more, based on the great ideas suggested by Winterfest visitors.

Happy holidays to all!

As of today, SL Viewer 2.4 is the default Second Life Viewer download for new Residents! As was mentioned in the Viewer 2.4 Beta blog post, this is largely a maintenance release focused on improving user experience, stability, and performance. This release does, however, have a few important changes and additions, including the following:

A Cleaner User Experience and More Customization Options in Preferences

Throughout 2010, we’ve added many new Preferences to the Viewer and it was time to not only reorganize and clean up the layout, but also add popular customization options, such as:

• Color and transparency options that allow you to change the look of Viewer windows
• Options to easily enable the Advanced and Developer menus
• A new preference that you can use to turn group and IM chat pop-ups on or off whenever you like

Support for External Text Editors when Working with LSL

Here’s a good one for content creators and developers. Now, you can use your favorite script editor to edit LSL scripts outside of the Viewer. In  Viewer 2.4, enabling the new ‘ExternalEditor’ debug setting will allow you to specify the path to your own text editor (for example: /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/MacOS/TextMate). When the setting is enabled, just open the Script Editor in the Viewer and click the “Edit” button, and the text editor you specified in debug settings will then open with the script you have open in the Viewer. Any changes you make and save in the text editor will automatically appear in the Script window in the Viewer.

Graphics Improvements

We continue to make numerous improvements to Viewer graphics as we move closer to integrating Mesh Import into Viewer 2. You can see more detail in the Release Notes, but we’ve improved antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, snapshots, and we’ll see even more in upcoming releases.

Performance Improvements

Viewer 2 performance is improving, as shown by steadily decreasing crash rates that are now close to those for Viewer 1.23, but we know there’s still more to do. So if you do crash, please be sure to send us a crash  report, as they are essential to helping us understand where issues occur, which allows us to better prioritize our work.

An Auto-Updater Tool

We now have an auto-updater for Viewer 2! This means that whenever a new Viewer is released, the next one being Viewer 2.5, it automatically  downloads the newest software in the background and offers you the  ability to upgrade when it’s ready. You can still decide whether you want to install the new version or not, but the auto-updater will help ensure that you’re always using the most up-to-date version of the SL Viewer. Keep in mind, the auto-updater will only work with optional updates. Mandatory updates will continue to work as they have in the past.

Finally, to those of you who gave us feedback on previous versions of Viewer 2, we offer a heartfelt thank you for all your bug reports, forum and blog comments, and Tweets using the #slviewer2 hashtag. Your input is invaluable as we continue to prioritize our 2011 Viewer 2 roadmap.

So download Viewer 2.4 — and keep that feedback coming!

Helpful Links

• Download Viewer 2.4:
  • Windows | Mac | Linux
• Viewer 2.4 Release Notes
• SL Forum on Viewer 2
• SL Answers on Viewer 2.4