Catznip Releases R13.1

Writing today from the lounge chair by my little caravan in Bellisseria. It’s sunny in both SL and RL today but the humidity is lower in SL, so I’ve come inworld to relax in comfort. Now, on to today’s topic, the latest Catznip release.

Back when R13 came out, the Catznip team set a goal of more frequent “maintenance” releases. R13.1 is the first of these, so it looks like the team are keeping to their goal. For the details, release notes here.

So what’s in a maintenance release? One would assume from the title that these would primarily be vehicles for bug fixes. But there is one big and a few minor features rolled into R13.1 as well as fixes.

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)

As I’ve harped on in other posts, if you are not familiar with MFA, you should be. What’s more, you should be using it. See the Lindens’ post about it here. In short, it’s a comparatively simple way to dramatically increase the security of your account.

Once setup, it becomes required to access your account on the web. For now, viewers may enforce it. So far, the standard Linden Lab viewer and Catznip, with this release, will enforce MFA if it is setup on your account. Firestorm does not yet, but most likely will soon.

Soon after all the major third-party viewers can handle MFA, I suspect the switch will be thrown to require its use if it is set up. Then, you will be able to ensure that nobody has access to your account unless they also have access to your second identity factor; a compromised password will not, by itself, compromise your whole account.

Mouselook Improvements

A few user interface tweaks have been added to ease interaction and smooth some of the occasionally jarring parts of the mouselook experience.

Group Activation

A click-the-URL shortcut to activate a group has been added. This is intended to make access to group benefits simpler in places like shops and entertainment venues where group joiners spill the group’s URL into chat.

Minor Improvements

Include some additional shortcut keys for navigating chat tabs, more choices in context menus for items in the edit outfit tab, and the ability to selectively clear teleport history because… sneaky.

Bug Fixes

But of course there a bug fixes. Half a dozen general and a couple in RLV.