• New spaces (including an underwater world and conferencing space)
• Two new avatars
• Autoplaying soundtracks (user-configurable via right-click or control-click)
• Link any 3D object to launch a webpage
• Increased duration limits for audio and video clips (5m each)
• Experimental new prop: an expoding barrel. With physics. By popular request (!); You might have fun with this one. :-)
• Stability updates for networking and some other functionality

More news coming soon…

PS – We’re seeing some issues with double-click (zoom) navigation in Mac clients in this release. We’re looking into it.

Some general updates filtered through last week, our first all-round upgrade since Jan 1.

Mostly, this round contains lots of bugfixes for issues that you’ve kindly drawn to our attention in the last couple of weeks. Lots of stability and UI fixes are scattered throughout the release.

We’ve also been listening to your requests for new features.

As of last week, those who’ve been around for a while will notice the new list of online users, which you’ll find under Populated Spaces in the Home tab. Under Explore, you can now also sort by whether a space has any online users now.

More coming soon; Happy February!

Thanks to Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch for reviewing the JLI beta! That’s a nice thing to wake up to on a Monday morning.

Writes Jason: “Canadian-based Leap In Entertainment thinks it can do what Google couldn’t, and has just launched a brand new virtual world that might actually stand a chance.”

Go check out the review here.