Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC13. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC12), you will be required to update to RC13 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page (or get.secondlife.com).

This RC13 introduces… drum roll… the feature VWR-5059 which enables you to switch the look and feel of the User Interface between 2 options: the classic grey color or a lighter blue/silver theme. Go to Preferences>Skins. (Side note for SL historians keeping track: As you know, the multi-month project was code named “Project Dazzle”– but that’s really the name of the architecture juggernaut work that got us to refresh the UI. In the final presentation in 1.20 Viewer, we opted to call the resulting color option by a simpler name, ‘Silver’.)

EDIT 2008-07-10 11:30PST: To be clear, the feature VWR-5059 allows you to switch between the 2 pre-installed skins only, as requested by many Residents in this 1.20 viewer. This is not the complete Skinning architecture outlined in the Skinning project… which is a long term project and takes more time. Resident-created skins will still need to update their instructions to install them, if they are posted on the SL wiki.

IMPORTANT: Minor Known Issues with RC13:

• It is a Known Bug that HTML based windows (like Search>All) will still have a scroll bar with the lighter Silver look to them, even if you are using the Classic skin.
• It is a Known Bug that the art arrows on some dropdown combo boxes may appear clipped.

• When upgrading from RC12 to RC13, the new XML skins files are installed (under-the-hood) to a folder called \skins\default\xui\. Unfortunately this leaves behind legacy files from the previous Release Candidate in the old \skins\xui folder. This is completely harmless and will not affect RC13 at all. We mention this only to avoid confusion by advanced users who are interested in the Skinning architecture. The next iteration of the Release Candidate will resolve this problem.

Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”. Visit the Test Viewers download page (Note: use the links at bottom of page, under Test Viewers) to get started with the new Release Candidate!

Fixes in 1.20 RC13:

Changes:
* The viewer installs with a default classic grey color of the User Interface. This can be changed in Preferences > Skins (It requires a restart of the viewer to take effect.)

Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-7893: create a Classic skin for the viewer
** Thank you to McCabe Maxsted for the Open Source contribution of the Classic art assets!
* Fixed: VWR-5059: add option to switch between a Classic and Silver theme from within Preferences
* Fixed: VWR-3529: WindLight: Saving snapshots to disk crashes viewer
* Fixed: Assign user agent strings with the name of skin in the internal Mozilla browser
* Fixed: The user-agent string in the browser is not HTTP 1.1 compliant
* Fixed: A new debug setting ‘SkinCurrent’ is used to persist the chosen skin, to avoid crashing older builds