Great Googly Moogly!

You may have noticed a few minor changes here at Andromeda Media Universe. Well, ok, a lot of changes actually. RSS feeds, the ability to have our updates sent directly to your email, DHTML tooltips, some screenshots of the Jooce Desktop, an a complete rewrite of some of the pages on the site complete with new visuals.

Needless to say we've been busy over here.

We even reworked the blog archive to better fit with the website theme, as well as added some amusing tooltips to the header titles - go ahead, mouse over the words "Developer Blog", we'll wait.

Nearly every picture on this site now has a helpful (or amusing) tooltip to give you an extra bit of information. The RSS Subscription dropdown menu has (count'em) a total of 11 different ways you can keep up to date with this site (not including the actual blog archive address).

The blog archive dates back to 2006, back to the days of our earlier research leading up to Andromeda Media Universe and even before VR5 Online was discontinued in order to put full effort into this project and join up with Queller Technology Group. So take some time and re-read some of the history and research leading up to what you see today. Some of it is inspiring, while some of it is actually quite funny or off topic.

In Other News ---

We spent a majority of last night working on the login window for the browser. After resolving a Vista issue we moved on to more important things, such as what things you should be able to do when you log in. To date, the username field is a conditional dropdown menu, and when the system sees multiple profiles saved, will give you the option of choosing one. The password field is to be expected, just normal stuff. And then here is the Location dropdown menu...

We're not entirely certain why this wasn't thought of before (aside from the interesting but nearly useless version in Second Life). The Start Location drop down has three options:

1. Home: This is the Home location that you have chosen, not some predefined gateway.
2. Last Location: Where you were when you logged out.
3. From Bookmark: By far our favorite addition. As a user, you obviously have a list of favorite locations saved for easy teleport. So why not be able to choose one of them as your starting location?
   

So there you have it. You get to choose your home location, you get to choose last location, or you can start from any number of bookmarks you have saved.

Speaking of Bookmarks, the bookmark system will have two views. The compact view is the automatic default and shows just the names of the locations (which are named by default via the zone names but can be easily renamed manually). When you hover your mouse over a Bookmark name for a few seconds it will show extended information such as a thumbnail image of the location, location information, planet and owner of the location.

Everything considered, we've been really busy.

Until next time -

William Burns (Project Leader)
Andromeda Media Universe
http://darianknight.110mb.com