If you’re not familiar with MystiTool, it is a HUD that is a veritable Swiss Army knife of useful things. It dates back to the earlier days of Second Life, where many things we now take for granted were absent or severely basic. For example, you needed an object or HUD called a Flight Assist (or Flight Feather, or Flight Ring, or any number of other names) if you wanted to fly above 200 metres. Rather than take up valuable attach points, back in the days before we had multiple attach points, having that in the MystiTool rather than as a separate object was beneficial. Since then, the flight limit has been raised several times and then in 2012 was removed altogether, making that feature of the MystiTool redundant.
Similarly, as Viewers (both Third Party and Official) have added functionality previously offered by the MystiTool, so those too have become obsolete (or, at least, less useful). Examples include the Radar, scanning a sim for avatars, chat notifications (such as an avatar entering chat range), TP to camera, Favourites, and TP History. Some are only included in Third Party Viewers like Firestorm, but some have even made it into the Official Viewer.
The feature erosion is not too dissimilar to the history of Microsoft Windows; in the early days, various tools, utilities and applications filled in the gaps in functionality missing from Windows itself, and gradually Microsoft incorporated the ideas and made many redundant. A case in point was Icon Hear It which added sounds to events in Windows 3.11, and was rendered instantly obsolete by Windows 95 which had that built in. But I digress.
But that doesn’t mean that MystiTool is now obsolete, as there are plenty of features that are still useful. Furthermore, with v2.0 of MystiTool, many of these features are now implemented as plugins which means you can choose to uninstall them, which reduces your script count and memory usage by allowing you to prune them out. You can therefore trim the MystiTool right down to only those non-obsolete features that you actually use.
Personally, I regularly use the Elevator & Sky Platform Rezzer, the Pose Stand Rezzer (especially the more fully featured deluxe pose stand, although the basic one is also useful), Object Chat ID (useful for finding the owner of a chatty object), Facial Emoter (I use it for photography), Collision Notification, Avatar Information and Channel Listener (useful to find who is talking to scripted objects, but also for debugging your own).
As the feature set continues to shrink, the argument for having a MystiTool gets weaker. It is no longer the must-have tool that it once was, but for many ‘oldies’ like me (currently 6 years & 3 months, or 2300 days) it is something that has been part of our SL for so long that it is something to which we have become immensely attached (no pun intended) and will probably hold onto until completely redundant, if not beyond.
Further reading
I Still Use My Mystitool by Cheyenne Palisades
Posted in January 2013. A similar article to this one, but slightly out of date now. More descriptive about some of the features than this article is.
Official MystiTool blog by Mystical Cookie
The official MystiTool blog
MystiTool on the SL Marketplace
A link to MystiTool on the Marketplace, which also summarises the full feature list.
Are you a MystiTool user? If so, please do comment below with what features you regularly use!
