From 8th Sept 2010 all logins via Emerald shall be blocked. The full story and details can be found by visiting the official LL LINK.

I have been now personally using Phoenix Viewer and it has been accepted by LL now too. I suggest all Emerald users give it a try.

From the Phoenix team:

We offer 2 versions of our viewer, an optimized and a standard.  The optimized delivers a significant and **noticeable performance boost** for some gaming machines using a special Windows instruction set.  Not all computers have this set, mostly slightly older models and therefore must use the standard viewer option.  The majority of other viewers only release a standard version, handicapping residents with a much faster CPU.  You can download either version from our main website Download Phoenix.

They have an in-world support group too and at present it contains no less than 2800 AV’s. Plus with over 40,000 downloads of Phoenix, I think it says enough.

In-world link to join: secondlife:///app/group/ 3a1be8d4-01f3-bc1a-2703-442f0cc8f2dd/about

TPVD: Phoenix is now officially on the TPVD list too. Read more HERE.

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So now that the first year of the site being with the new host was almost up, it was either pay for the same service for another year or upgrade to a new featured service. I opted to upgrade to a more reliable one. Well, I can’t say the last year has been unreliable. The site has been up 99.9% of the time. It was just so slow to load at times! But now with this new upgrade you shall hopefully all notice a significant speed increase when refreshing the site

I have more features at my fingertips now too, even tho it’s now costing me twice as much to host, but in the near future I hope to have a lot more to offer the SL users and of course geemix listeners.

Thank you to each of you for the support over the last year, and especially to those who have donated via the PayPal option on the left side. Thank you one and all…here’s looking forward to another year of geemix.com

However, that will be the last ever version. R.I.P Emerald I guess.

On a plus note, there is another viewer which is exact same as Emerald, well..it will be, since it using the same source code etc.

It is called Emergence Viewer and more details can be found here. The current download can be found here and here. Currently at v1.5.0.2. I have yet to test this one tho as I am waiting right up to the end with Emerald V1.5.0.2600.

As with most viewers, it’s best to uninstall Emerald when you decide you are gonna move onto another viewer.

There are of course other viewers around for those who still refuse to use Linden Labs’ Viewer 2.

Imprudence seems to be very popular also and more details can be found here. Seems to be a popular viewer amongst AV’s I have talked to on SL.

Also phoenix viewer is available and might be worthy of a look. I have not tested this one, but have been informed it’s pretty stable….so far. You can find out all the details about this viewer at the official phoenix website. Windows, Mac and Linux versions available.

This viewer is also basically Emerald! Some of the team members who left during the split up have decided to release Phoenix. I have tested it for a day and although I had to also download the side by side fix, it seems to be stable on my pc.  You can get a couple of versions of it for new and older PC’s too. Which may help some folks too. neat touch. Get the downloads here.

Also on the Phoenix website are details about the Emerald split. Read about it all via Jessica’s wordpress page here which should help clarify some of the things mentioned in the link at the top of this blog. So the battle between Emergence and Phoenix viewers seems to be on! I’m gonna stick with Phoenix for now….good luck everyone

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Taken from http://nwn.blogs.com/ :

Linden Lab Finally Issues Statement on Emerald — Which Now Reportedly Ac

 Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale has just issued a statement acknowledging that the companyremoved Emerald from its list of authorized third party viewers after it was used by the lead developer in a denial-of-service attack, and is discussing its fate with the anonymous development team behind it, almost all of whom are only known by their Second Life names. The company may still disable Emerald logins, but reportedly, has not decided on that yet. These moves bring Linden Lab in substantial conflict with the activity of its own users, because Emerald is currently used by an extremely large number of active Second Life users.

How large? Last July I reported that nearly 1 in 3 daily Second Life users are accessing Second Life not through the official viewer software, but via Emerald. Since then, however, reliable sources have informed me that Emerald activity is even larger than that number suggests. That, in fact, Emerald now accounts for nearly 50% of total Second Life user hours. (I checked this figure with Linden Lab, which declined comment.) What’s more, that third party viewers attract more combined user hours than any of the official Linden-made viewers, with Emerald far and away the leader. That’s part of the broader context for this policy move, which also adds more context to the layoffs and corporate tumult that recently beset Linden Lab: Not only did the company’s Viewer 2 not gain many more new users (despite the enormous resources spent on it), but it’s been eclipsed by a third party viewer created by a development team of unknown provenance and a history of dubious activity. And this story has only gotten started.

And….this from the Emerald Team on 25th Aug 2010:

Yesterday, the Emerald Development team received a large list of requirements and conditions from LL. Today we met with LL and reviewed all of those conditions for clarification. At this point, I can safely say that we fully intend to address and fulfill ALL of them as soon as we possibly can. We have been asked not to disclose the requirements at this time.

Although some of these conditions will be very difficult, we feel they are reasonable considering recent events.  Due to that difficulty however, some will take more time than others to fulfill. It is a big list of things that we need to do and we will be providing LL with a time frame on each individual item by Friday. Once we have completed these items to the full satisfaction of Linden Lab, we intend to re-apply for the TPVD.

We feel it is important during this time to inform everyone that although Linden Lab has encouraged the use of other viewers, the use of the Emerald viewer is still a decision that is yours to make. Emerald will not be blocked unless we fail to fulfill our requirements in the time allotted.

Linden Lab has told us that they want us to stop using the emkdu.dll or llkdu.dll files because they are not compliant with the GPL. For those wondering what KDU is, it’s a closed source image decoding library which provides a significant speed improvement over the open source alternative. However, since LL wishes us not to use it, I would like to take a step in that direction as a show of faith to the Lab right now.  I will ask our users to go into your Emerald install directory while you are not logged into the viewer and delete the file named emkdu.dll. The viewer will continue to function correctly however it will be slower. This is only a request from us and not a requirement. Our next release will not include this file.

In the coming days, some of the older versions of Emerald Viewer may be blocked from logging in at our request, this however will not happen until updated versions are made available on our website.

I would also like to extend a sincere apology to our users for all the confusion over the last few days. It has been a very difficult week for us but we expect things should start too quiet down now.

So in closing, I will reiterate, Emerald Dev Team intends to fully comply with the conditions set out before us by Linden Lab, and we plan to do so within the shortest time frame possible. Use of the Emerald viewer is still your choice and Emerald is not a malicious viewer.

Sincerely, Jessica Lyon

More updates can be found here: http://blog.modularsystems.sl/2010/08/25/ll-requirements-for-emerald/

Come join us at the Ambrosia Dance Club for a weekend party not to be missed. The sim will be locked out at 50 Avatars and for a chance to win some L$ in prizes, make sure you get there early.

Please don’t dress up in HUGE Av’s or bring any weapons if your costume includes them. Thx.

Music from all years and all your face requests. It’s gonna be a packed 2 hour event and I look forward to seeing you all there.