Katharine Berry, a student in the UK, has created an in-browser AJAX application that allows you to log into the virtual world of Second Life, but without all of the laggy graphics. This is a great way to pop in-world for a moment if you just want to chat with other residents, and as far as anybody else will be able to tell your avatar will look just fine (although mostly immobile).
While you can't yet initiate new IM sessions or use the Search functions (these are coming), you can reply to any incoming IMs and participate in local chat wherever your avatar happens to be. You can also teleport your avatar to other locations via an on-screen map, although once there you can't really walk around.
The interface is really simple, really fast, and works in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and newer versions of Safari. You can take it for a quick test drive by clicking here.
Hmmm... maybe I should blog this after all! Sounds very interesting.
Yeh i havent tried it yet, but i cant wait to muck around with this tonight!
Good find Caleb...
Have to admit, I'm kind of wary about typing my SL userid + password into some 3rd party site.... no matter how full of splodgy ajaxy goodness it might be...
I waited inworld while a friend came in through Katharine's website portal. It is very cool to say the least. This youngster has sure turned things around for the rest of us. Bravo to her!
Now i just want to see an open source, embedable one! cos Shep has a good point...
I'd love to see an open source version of this too. I don't know if anyone else has thought of this, but your SL id is tied to your credit card info and potentially your paypal account. Anyone willing to give that information up?
The link wont work.
such a interface browserless in ncurses would be awesome
if you're worried about security...the simplest answer to that would be to make yourself an alt to play with it.
The link gives you this:
Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Apache Server at secure.katharineberry.co.uk Port 443
Yeh it's been hit by boingboing and digg and a bunch of other places. you may have to give it a day or 2 untill you can use it again guys..
Very cool! Worked yesterday but not now :( Is source available? I hate when boingboing publishes links to servers that can't handle traffic...anyways...great work! I am thinking of ways to inflate sim traffic and this may help O.o
How long has it not worked? Second Life is down this morning for updates so perhaps after its online again it will work.
Shep says:
Have to admit, I'm kind of wary about typing my SL userid + password into some 3rd party site.... no matter how full of splodgy ajaxy goodness it might be...
Can anyone address this point? Clearly it would seem to be a bad idea to enter one's password at a third-party site, and the login page https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat gives no information that would make me feel secure about someone having and potentially using or leaking that personal info.
( the link would not open for me as of this morn ) edit: page up as of 1pm SL time. :)
edit 7/10:
At Katherine's blog she addresses this concern this way:
I promise I won’t, and there are probably some dire legal consequences if I do. But I can’t make you believe me, and it’s probably a good idea not to believe any random person. However, I give my word that I won’t. If that’s not good enough, just don’t use it.
edit 7/11:
At her login page, she says:
Your password is passed to my server encrypted, and passed to Linden Lab's server encrypted.
It is never stored or logged.
That said, use your own judgement before using this. If you're unsure, perhaps try an alt with a different password first?
Spent 10 minutes (3x) trying to connect (Firefox 2). The login woked, but then I get a box saying:
Loading subsystems. Please wait...
You probably caught me when I was working on internationalisation support. I broke it a few times while doing that. :(
Should be alive now. I think.
Welcome to Metaversed Katherine, and all the others who're posting here for the first time. Good to see you in here!
And great work Katherine. Now how about making your code open source so the community can improve it and we can use it on our own servers?
I will - soon. Currently LibSL is obsessively sending packets that are over an hour old, despite having sent hundreds or thousands of packets successfully since then. It eventually does this to the point of exhausting all resources to do anything else. I'm sure it's not meant to do that. >.>
And it will soon work in Spanish and French too! (I need someone to offer to translate into anything else. :p) :D
P.S. My name has two "A"s and one "E."
Hello everyone, and thank you Katharine for your wonderful work. I am try to run ajaxlife locally on winxp SP2, and the login seems to work, but stops after "Connecting to SecondLife", not ever moving to the "main.kat" for the UI function. Is anyone having this issue or know how I might be able to address it.
The debug console seems to hang here:
DEBUG [Cindi Allen]: Running event queue for IBM 6 (72.5.13.52:13004)
I have tried with seperate local server for .js files and using "https://ajaxlife.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife/" , I get the same issue. Thanks in advance for your help.
Josh
Error parsing reply XML: The i4 tag from namespace is expected. Line 198, position 34. at System.Xml.XmlReader.ReadElementString (System.String name) [0x00000] at libsecondlife.NetworkManager.ReadStringValue (System.Xml.XmlReader reader) [0x00000] at libsecondlife.NetworkManager.ReadInventoryMember (System.Xml.XmlReader reader, System.Int32& typeDefault, System.Int32& version, System.String& invName, libsecondlife.LLUUID& folderID, libsecondlife.LLUUID& parentID) [0x00000] at libsecondlife.NetworkManager.LoginResponseCallback (IAsyncResult result) [0x00000]
And your point is?
Works like a charm. Thanks Katharine!
huh!
Does your web application make use of the same ports as the "real" client does? Asking that, because in some places of course one can't make use of SL, since important ports are blocked. So I hoped to find that it makes use of e.g. just port 80 and all the other traffic traverses between your webapp and the sl servers...
For the rest (and what i've seen): Nice work! :)
After looking for something just like this package, I have tried it, and it seems to hang on 'precaching' I am behind a firewall, so I could do with knowing if the firewall is blocking a particular port that is needed, or if it is SLs servers again.
Not working :-(