So far so good with Firestorm

It's been a couple or so days now since I updated Firestorm to 3.3.0 and, so far, so good. Unlike back in June last year, when I first tried it, I seem to be sticking with it in preference to Phoenix. The subsequent releases of Firestorm had me using it less and less so this is a bit of a first -- a version of Firestorm that is "sticking".

It's not without it's problems, of course. I've found that pressing the people button (to get the radar) can, randomly, cause a crash to the desktop. In this case it seems that it's only the first use of the button in any session. If it works first time it'll work for the rest of that session. I've yet to work out what the pattern is here.

The only other big problem I've found so far is the coding sea sickness issue I mentioned earlier. I'm still not sure if that's a skin issue or a general issue -- I must find the time to give that a proper test.

Some of the very minor niggles that used to bother me seem to have been fixed too. One good example is that they've introduced the description field into the payment dialog. This was always a handy thing for me in Phoenix. I use a different account to hold the money for Z&A Productions so, when I transfer money to that account, I make sure I give it a useful description so as to help keep track of what's what (same when going the other way too). Firestorm didn't have that so no payments could have those useful descriptions. Now that that's in Firestorm that's one less thing that gets in my way and drives me back into Phoenix.

So far, in the past couple of days, only one thing has driven me back into Phoenix. I needed to perm the contents of a build and the permission setting dialog is a bit messed up. One of the check boxes is partly hidden behind another control:

While it's no show-stopper, I was busy and needed to get it sorted there and then so it was quicker to switch to Phoenix so I could have confidence that the operation was working as I needed. I suspect this might be a skin issue (I'm using the vintage skin which I really like as it makes me feel right at home).

Another thing that's (still) missing is the ability to click on avatar names when they show up in local as part of radar alerts (the chats that tell you when an avatar has entered the region, or come in draw distance, or come in chat range, etc...). I did JIRA this back in the middle of last year (FIRE-1439) and I thought it had been added but, as of 3.3.0, it still doesn't happen. Looking at the JIRA again I see that it says that it's fixed for "Phoenix Firestorm 4.0.1" so I guess it's done but merged into a body of code that isn't 3.3.0.

As someone who looks after a region, runs a store and provides a public hangout it's an annoying omission. It does make keeping an eye on things just a little harder than it is under Phoenix.

It goes without saying that search is still terrible. I really don't like how it's done now. Of course, this isn't the fault of the Firestorm team, that's down to the Lab, but I wish they'd do something a bit faster and less directly web-based.

In summary: so far, so good. I'm logging in with Firestorm pretty much every time now that I'm using 3.3.0. I've only switched to Phoenix once because of a problem.