Thursday, February 25, 2010

RestrainedLife changes name (final)

Hello again,

After much discussion with many people, I have found out that most of the suggestions for the new name of the RLV tended to converge independently towards "Restrained Living Viewer". I kinda like this name, even though I originally wanted to take make it less fetishy... But one killer argument is that the viewer should be as easy to find (on Google or elsewhere) with its new name than with its original one. "Red Light" would not lead you anywhere near the RLV unfortunately. Another killer argument is that "Red Light" is actually the name of an adult-oriented 3D platform that is somewhat a competitor to Second Life. No less ! Proves that the name was not so bad, but someone had the same idea first.

So it is settled now, after much thought, decision and indecision... to Restrained Living Viewer. Not "Red Light Viewer" as I initially planned, but that name did not have much meaning, it was like a placeholder. "Restrained Living Viewer" has much more substance to it, is very close to the original name, and keeps the two most important words of the three : "Restrained" and "Viewer". Apologies to those who hoped the new name would be less fetishy, I really tried as hard as I could, but hey, after all it is not that adult-oriented, is it ?

In a nutshell, here is a recap of the most important reasons why I'm choosing this name among the others :
- It abbreviates to "RLV"
- It is very close to the original name, so it won't be a huge change in the mind of the users
- Losing "Restrained" would lose many search results in Google or other search engines (including within SL), and that is one of the best argument to keeping it
- It is more positive than "Restrained Life", which has a sense of coercion that "Restrained Living" does not have (the latter sounds more like a choice of life rather than an imposition). Yes I know this is subtle, but it counts

Ok so now that this is settled, I can start working at changing the name everywhere I can. Code, manuals, API, scripts... it will take a while before everything is clean again, but you won't notice most of the changes anyway. And I will not rush, Linden Lab is giving us 3 months to make the move. So scripters do not need to rush either. Let's all do this smoothly and nobody will get hurt.

What you will notice is a new command called @versionnew that will return "RestrainedLiving viewer v1.23.0 (SL 1.23.5)", exactly like @version which will remain unchanged. Note that "RestrainedLiving" will be one word, without a space. @versionnum will remain unchanged as well, of course.

I want to thank all of you who have helped me with the choice of the new name, and for your support through your kind messages, notecards, blog posts... I really, really appreciate your concern.

Love you all,
Marine