Things are progressing almost faster than I can keep up with them!  I’ve been pretty sick in RL over the past couple of weeks, thanks to too many night spent driving instead of sleeping, probably.  Anyway, there will be a major update to the vendor this week, and I wanted to let everyone know what the update will consist of:

• A (barely) better looking vendor
• The ability to display multiple users in a vendor
• The ability for venue or store owners to sell your music for an additional commission (it will not change your take, it will add to the selling price in THEIR VENDOR ONLY, depending on what markup they assign).
• Added ability to auto-update your vendor.  All you will have to do to bring your vendor up-to-date is rez an “Update Patch” object within 20m of your vendor(s).
• With the auto-update ability means that you can make significant changes to your vendor’s look and feel (ie- add “Tip Me” buttons, an answering machine, or pretty much anything else you want.  The next step (for version 1.0) is to have an API for changing the way users interact with a vendor.  Hopefully this will inspire innovation and new designs for the vendors.  If they’re really cool you may even be able to sell your pimped out vendor to other SECONDtunes artists and/or venue/store owners.  More info on this coming soon!
• An added item to your “Artist Information” for a texture to display for your spot in vendors.  By default it’s just a simple “t² Artist” square.  If you visit the store in Yongnam, you can see that a couple of artists have textures already, and it makes for a much cooler experience.
• A couple of performance fixes to make it run a little smoother (small things like not having to click the vendor to initiate it after permissions are set).
• A distributable notecard with a simple primer for new listeners.  This should save a couple of the “so how does this work” questions.
• More stuff I’m not remembering now because I’m still doped up on cold & flu medicine.

I’m way excited about the new API, because I’m no dummy when it comes to understanding my limitations, especially in terms of building in SL.  I’m getting pretty good at the scripting stuff, but trying to make cool stuff with the touchpad on my laptop while on the road proves to be a giant pain in the butt!  This will hopefully provide a creative outlet for folks, as well as improving the product as a whole.  Some ideas for things folks will be able to do: Replace the Object Text method of displaying song information possibly with XYText or some other texture-font, Create a chat-based version that could possibly interact with text-based clients like SLeek, Make a menu-based artist or song selector, or plenty of other things I haven’t even thought of.  You can expect to see the API begin to take shape with version 0.91.  I’ll probably put a wiki up to allow for contributions of cool scripts, as well as to let folks know about new calls and functions available.

Be expecting this gigantic update in the next 48 hours!