The renown Nicholaz Beresford, a prolific patcher for the open-source SL Viewer, has long entertained PC users with a patched version of the client, often integrating bug fixes which are only later incorporated into the official LL viewers. His current builds maintain a fully non-Voice viewer as well as a Voice-enabled viewer with a detached Friends list, much like the pre-Communicate window days. The viewer also adds useful features such as a “red map indicator” to alert the user that they have been disconnected from the LL servers.  His blog entry announcing the Mac version the viewer is here.

The Mac version is contributed by Barney Boomslang.  His detailed instructions and download link can be found at his blog entry here.  In short, you need to have the current official viewer from LL, 1.18.3(5), installed first.  Then download Barney’s patch, which opens into an executable inside a disk image that will then patch the SL client within the targeted directory (be sure there’s only one such SL client in this directory).  Finally, just run your SL viewer and it will have a banner notifying you it’s the Nicholaz patched version. FYI, the Nicholaz builds are updated quite frequently, things can break, your mileage may vary, etc.  If something does break, you can just install an earlier patch version or reinstall the official LL viewer.  The current patch available as of today is BleedingEdge-S.

If you do give this viewer a try, please comment on your experiences here.  Good luck and enjoy!