Cool VL Viewer forum

Installing Cool VL Viewer on a Mac does not seem to update the URI that tells your web browser what program to invoke when you click a link like this: secondlife://MADO/120/176/38 in, for example, the Destination Guide. If you have multiple viewers installed on your system, you may find the link invoking the wrong one, even if you already have an instance of Cool VL Viewer running. Even if you only use Cool VL Viewer, installing a new release (which does not replace the old one, quite correctly in my view) seems to leave the URI unupdated, so that it may still be pointing at an earlier release than the one you want to run.

I have tried various workarounds, but none seemed to be consistently successful. Often, just running an old copy of a viewer other than Cool VL Viewer would cause that viewer to become the default viewer invoked by my browser. Finally, I seem to have found an answer, and I would like to share it with the forum. I discovered a tool called RCDefaultApp which adds a pane to your System Preferences that allows you to explicitly control which application is invoked by any URI.

This tool is free, and you can download it here: http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/

Under Linux, the Cool VL Viewer URL handler gets registered via the register_secondlifeprotocol.sh script which is ran each time the viewer is started, but there's no such script for the Mac...

Under Windows, the URL handler gets registered by the installer in Windows' registry.

Perhaps the MacOS-X installer script would need to perform the URL handler registration... Kathrine, any thought on this ?...

Back in the days when guru made the Mac builds, I had noticed the issue too, and guru posted a little utility allowing to register the handler for 'secondlife:' URLs to open Cool VL Viewer. I'm attaching it to this post in a zip. The usage is:
defaultapp secondlife <full path to Cool VL Viewer.app>
run from a Terminal.
At least, that was how it worked for me. And you only need to do it once: once registered, it'll stay that way.

Hope this helps!

Yes, I have Gurucoyote's little app, and used it. Sadly, it didn't seem to deliver a permanent fix for me. Running other viewers would cause it to revert, and it didn't resolve the problem of picking up old releases of Cool VL Viewer either. I ran the app without the full path, according to Gurucoyote's instructions:

$./defaultapp secondlife "Cool VL Viewer"

If it really requires the full path as you used it, presumably it might work if one re-ran it for each new release?

Hi all,

well, guess i need to add some support for the LaunchServices API than and enhance the Info.plist file a bit.

Thats the basic API needed to register such things.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ ... Intro.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5954 ... on-mac-osx

Should not be too hard, basically just adding CFBundleURLTypes and a few other hints to the plist, once that is done, the rest should work automatically if the viewer is installed in the Applications folder (or when it was dragged via the Finder).

Kathrine