Superboard: A Word (or two) From MechanizedLIFE

Posted on May 12, 2009
Filed Under Interesting Items | 2 Comments

Contributed by Paypabak Writer

I’ll just say up front that I receive commissions on the products I’m about to review for you as I handle customer service for them. If you want to read a less-biased opinion, I give you Crap Mariner’s recent blog.  Crap is a talented Second Life programmer in his own right, so his praise might mean more to you than mine (and note Radar’s comment, another SL blogger who’s opinion I respect). Nonetheless, what I have to say is more on the transitional aspect of what is going on at a business called MechanizedLIFE (ML). Last fall, the talents of Alidar Moxie and Codebastard Redgrave (Ali, Codie) merged, with Codie buying ML and taking on the marketing of Alidar’s line of gadgets that included what we call the Cog line: kiosks, event boards, and HUDs that connect SL with Google Calendars.

The basic concept is that Google Calendars is a very well worked out way to create, share, and manage calendars. Many people in SL have the same need to coordinate events and this line of CalendarCogs brings Google into SL via a HUD that provides the ability to program your Google calendar from within SL as well as view it and to provide information about upcoming events via a kiosk or an event board. The kiosk provides the information via overhead tags cycling through up to two weeks’ worth of events; the board displays lines of dates in a similar cycling pattern. The graphics provided with this article should clarify what I’m trying to describe with words.

A lot of my job for Ali and now Codie, is working with people to set up their gadgets. ML provides a Website personalized to the owner/avatar for administering the interface between gadget and Google Calendar. One can have multiple boards/kiosks displaying different Google calendars and aggregated calendars (merging more than one calendar into the mix) all managed by this Website. Further, I can actually log into their particular site to see how they have set up their calendars and devices and straighten out any misunderstandings. This usually results in people never contacting me again . . . because the operation is smooth once you understand it. That’s thanks mainly to Alidar Moxie who developed the Web support pages.

Recently, Alidar has gone on SL retirement and Codie has turned her attention to some of the requests made by ML customers about the Cogs. This is the “transition” I want to mention here. Last week, Codie responded to these requests by reducing the prim count of the event board nearly in half (from 63 prims to 33) while improving the readability of the fonts used and streamlining scripts used. She also made the background colors customizable as well as the frame of the board customizable by texture. For the HUD, she increased the number of display lines. And then, she designed the Superboard (seen above)!!! Although you can resize the regular event board, there’s a limit to what you can do and the length to width ratio is pretty tricky, so Codie reworked the board and is offering the Superboard for people who want a really big display! (In one of my pictures, if you look close on the right, you can see a regular board in comparison with the Superboard.

What I find most significant here is that Codie has opened the hood of Ali’s creations and has been able to tinker successfully: a testament to Ali’s skills as well as Codie’s. These products require ML to host support Websites for its Cog and StatsCollector products, so real money is invested on a monthly basis to ensure your single-payment product continues to perform. I don’t know of many products that do this as well as we do but am willing to learn about them if you want to leave a comment below.

MechanizedLIFE, a sponsor of SLFix.com, continues to serve SL with pride and well-backed products. Check out our Website, use Store Locations in the righthand column to visit inworld and XStreet stores.

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