Proper Inventory Tools

Zyx Flux's Inventory

While fishing my butt off at FFF 2014 I was lamenting my poor Inventory. More than a hundred prizes were dropping into my Objects folder like rain in Seattle. "This mess will take me more time to clear up than it took to create," I told myself. Rapidly dropping select transferable items on friends, relatives, and alts wasn't helping. It made me seriously wish for offline Inventory management. Strictly speaking, having to log into my account and be in-world isn't necessary for basic maintenance. And if I could do it from my iPad, all the better.

Sure, if I want to box up for storage items that I seldom use I need to be in-world (Or do I? Read on!), but transferring items to other avatars or moving things between folders only needs access to the Inventory Window and maybe a couple extra buttons.

The Close All Folders button in Alchemy's version of the Inventory window (shown above with it's annoying "A" folders) is a step forward. Other third party viewers have this feature, too, and it is one that The Lab should adopt (currently you need to use a menu). Better yet, let's have true windowing like desktop operating systems have. Highlight an object and with one button Properties pop up. A set of buttons to change from a directory tree view (so DOS 1.x), to list view, to columns view, or even a Cover Flow view that would present thumbnail renderings of objects, textures, and note cards. Or instead of needing to box items to store for later use [See the "Objects (Storage)" up there? I wrote about it here.] items could be sent to a secure backup folder. Only Linden System folders can't be deleted so if I accidentally hit the Delete key with my storage folder highlighted and I zip past the warning (don't ever tick the "Never Show Again" option), I'm fairly up a creek.

Offline management would require synchronization, but the extra few moments would be well worth the time. It isn't like we aren't used to the idea now, anyway. Apps sync between all my devices all the time: Messages, email, documents, password vaults, file storage, etc.

After all, our digital stuff in Second Life is just a bunch of files, right? We should be able to manage them as such.