You must upgrade your viewer by July 9th

News from Firestorm's homepage:

Linden Lab has stated they intend to begin rolling out Server Side Appearance (formerly known as Server Side Baking) on July 9th or shortly thereafter. It is of paramount importance to your user experience that ALL our users upgrade to this 4.4.1 version before the 9th of July. Even our 4.4.0 users should upgrade because 4.4.1 contains some additional SSA code from LL.

Server Side Baking Apocalypse 2

UPDATE:  The switch to Server Side Baking is imminent. Firestorm has released its new viewer that has SSB code. The Official Viewer also already has SSB. Everyone will need to update their viewer once SSB is turned on. All older viewers will no longer render avatars, they will be a textureless grey.

PERSONAL NOTE:  I am very sad to report this Mac user will no longer be able to take photographs with Lighting and Shadows once SSB is turned on. No SSB viewer works with Lighting and Shadows on my Mac. I crash every single time. The Materials Alpha viewer is already out, and it requires Lighting and Shadows to see it. Materials will be the next huge revolution in SL. If there are any Mac users and/or Mac bloggers who are able to use Lighting and Shadows in a SSB viewer, please contact me as soon as possible. IM or notecard inworld to: "DevinVaughn resident." Thank you!

Read about Project Sunshine here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Sunshine-Server_Side_Appearance
Read about the Firestorm release here: http://www.firestormviewer.org/
Watch Materials in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3AP_DADAY
Watch Loki Elliot's experiments in the new Materials Viewer: http://www.lokieliot.com/blog/?p=1237

News Report: Server Side Baking Apocalypse

Project_Sunshine
In the next few months, Linden Labs will switch the way avatars are loaded inworld. The goal of this change is to speed up the time it takes to render an avatar, and to stop bake fails. The downside of this major update is it will cause a lot of pain until the bugs are all worked out. You will be forced to upgrade your viewer or you will not see textures on your avatar, or alpha masks that hide your shape below a mesh. You will appear as a cloud or grey. Expect bug and/or crashes in all viewers across the board until the bugs are fixed. Many of your favorite viewers, or older viewers, will become unusable because they aren't updated to SSB.

Bloggers will be greatly effected. I personally will loose the ability to take lighting and shadow photographs unless Linden fixes the bug that crashes Macs on the current viewer code, or any viewer that uses the current code.

Check each viewer log for the latest news. Master list of 3rd Party Viewers.

Here are some news briefs:
Firestorm will update to SSB but they warn it will not be quality tested as much as they like before a major rollout. Mac version.
Phoenix 1.5 and Phoenix 1.6 are no longer being updated, therefore will not have SSB. Mac version.
Exodus update on SSB unknown. Has Tone Mapping. Mac version.
Nirans may update only once more, but it is unknown if the update will include SSB. No Mac version.
Cool Viewer is ready to go with SSB. No Mac version.

More news from Firestorm on SSB here: http://www.firestormviewer.org/qa-results