Posts with tag AddonSpotlight

Every weekend (ish), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

The addon world is currently abuzz with reactions to Blizzard's new addon policy (briefly: you can't charge for addons or solicit donations for them in-game). I'm not going to go there in this column, since it's been pretty well covered around the blogosphere and in any case I don't want to ignite a flame war.

However, I do want to talk about an issue related to the developments surrounding the new addon policy. The author of Outfitter (and GroupCalendar) has chosen to cease publishing those addons (in protest, asapparently). I rely on Outfitter on all of my characters, and I'll be sad to see it go. But if it isn't going to be updated any more, it's time to start looking for replacements.

Every weekend (well, almost every weekend), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

Before I get started, this addon is useful to one class only: Priests. Not only that, it's only useful to healing priests, since all it does is make it easier for you to keep track of your Prayer of Mending (sorry mages, wrong PoM).

Still here? Good. I've tried many different mods to tell me who my PoM is on and how many charges it has left, since it is a lovely spell and I like to use it to its fullest, which means I need to know when the darn Spirit Wolves have snagged it again so I can recast it on somebody useful. I used MendWatch all throughout Burning Crusade, but it had some annoying bugs when Wrath hit and I started hunting around for something more stable and easier to read. I quickly found PoM Tracker, and it's worked like a dream for me ever since.

Every weekend (well, almost every weekend), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

Mounts and vanity pets are a bigger part of many people's WoW than ever before. They don't take up any space in our bags (yay!), there are achievements for them (meh!), and there are a lot of cool ones to find (even if the raven mount keeps eluding me and the rest of my guildies). However, Blizzard's interface for these summonable beasts leaves a lot to be desired.

Livestock is here to fill that gap. It aims to handle all your vanity-pet and mount related needs, with the following features:

• Buttons to choose a pet or mount to summon
• Buttons to summon a random pet or mount
• Can ensure that you always have a pet out (i.e. resummon on zoning in to an instance, ressing, etc.)
• "Smart mount" feature to choose flying/ground mounts as appropriate
• Keybindings for all important function

This last feature is the one that makes it viable for me; if I have to click to mount up, I'm not going to use your mod.

Every weekend, Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

It just occurred to me that I've been really focusing on bar mods in the last few Spotlights (Dominos and AutoBar, specifically). To complete a trio, today I'm going to do it again with QBar. QBar is a simple mod, with a simple goal. Its reason for being is to show you any clickable quest items that may show up in your inventory, on a movable bar.

It has the following functionality:

• Positionable anywhere on your screen
• Scalable
• Can show/hide tooltips for its buttons
• Can expand horizontally or vertically
• Can ignore particular items if desired
• You can bind a key to the last used quest item. This is my favorite feature; just one click and then alt-Q (or whatever binding you set) does it from there.

Usually when we come to you with addons to highlight in one of our features, it's because we think it'll enhance your game play in some way. Well not today. Today it's all about the eye candy, or dare I even make this pun, the WoW factor. (Snap!) You've just gotten your interface ready for Wrath, so today we'll gonna trick that ride out. Can't begin our adventures in Northrend with a boring interface can we? You've seen some of the amazing interfaces in our Reader UI of the Week feature, so after the jump we'll take a look at 3 addons that help add that artistic flare to your interface.

Well, BlizzCon is over and while there were few surprises, I'll have a review and analysis of interface and addon news from BlizzCon in a special Creamy GUI Center tomorrow. In the mean time we have the big 3.0 patch today to deal with. So this week on Addon Spotlight we'll take a look at how to securely and safely update your addons using the Curse Gaming Client. Let's get to it!

Yes, you read that name right. I'll be doing Addon Spotlight while Sean is away for a little while. Don't worry though as The Creamy GUI Center will still be around for all your in depth addon needs, and I'll do my best to keep Addon Spotlight's tone and feel as close to Sean's as possible. Today in the spotlight is a duet of addons inspired by Apple OSX. Apple has always had a polished interface, with all sorts of options added with a graphical flare that sets it apart from others. Let's see if we can spice up our WoW UI with dock and dashboard addons that hope to bring some of that flare to WoW.

Once again, we find ourselves anxiously waiting for the World of Warcraft servers to come back up. However, today stands out as the best (and worst) variety of Tuesday downtime. Today we see the release of patch 2.4 and, for your addons, it is a day of reckoning. The majority of you are familiar with new content patches and the havoc they wreak on addons, but for those of you new to this; many of your addons could very well be broken.

There are a number of philosophies on how one should approach this. Some would suggest disabling your addons and waiting a few days until the storm subsides. Some have even said you should clear out your Addons folder, or your WTF folder. Clearing out the Addons folder gets rid of the addons, while deleting your WTF folder will clear all player and character settings. I personally go this route when I find that most of my addons are acting "buggy" or weird, or when I want to start with a clean slate.

I recently wrote an article on how you can automate the updating process, which I would recommend you take a look at, the servers are down anyway! Alright, really I would recommend reading through the comments of that post, as some of your fellow readers have some great advice and insight you may find helpful. Also, the folks over at WoWInterface contacted me in regards to their own addon updater, which looks promising as well. They have been busy testing it and have released a Windows version as well as a Mac/Linux version, both of which merit a look in my opinion. WoW Interface also released their Patch 2.4 Survival Guide, which I profiled recently. All this just screams that you've got options, so keep reading!

If you check out any of the major addon sites, you will more than likely find an older version, one that still functions, so it might suit your needs. If you want the most recent version, the WoW Ace Files site has the continuously updated version.

To open the configuration window for Quartz, use the following slash command:

/quartz

This will open up the options interface, where you can change the cast bars to your liking. One feature I found nice was the Merge Tradeskill option, which will take multiple casts of the same tradeskill and puts them into one cast bar, with a countdown timer. I like to know how much time I have to run and grab a beer when creating what seems like a thousand bandages.

In previous weeks we've looked at Lightheaded, which helps you understand how to do your quests, and Fubar, which can present all sorts of information concisely. Today's addon is a Fubar plugin that can work with Lightheaded to show you everything you need to know about your quests without having to click a lot of buttons or obscure your screen with your entire quest log.

QuestsFu presents you with a handy quest list in two ways. First of all, you can hover over its space on your Fubar and it'll give you a collapsable list of all the quests you're working on in a tooltip. In addition, you can have QuestsFu put up its own little quest tracker to replace Blizzard's standard tracker. The advantage to either of these color-coded quest lists is that you can just click on any of the quests themselves to open up a little window with all the quest information in it (pictured on the right). This is great for when you're in the middle of a quest and you don't want to stop moving, but you still forgot where exactly you were supposed to go or what the quest rewards are.

If you have Lightheaded installed too, then you can arrange an additional Lightheaded comments popup on the other side of your screen, and get hints about your quest without opening the big old quest log.

There are other quest managers out there, but this is my favorite because it feels so light weight, looks so attractive, works together with other addons so nicely, and also has such nice features, above and beyond what I've already mentioned:

• Edit the questlog on the fly, adding or removing quests with ease.
• Display quest levels, difficulty, zones, and objectives clearly.
• Put objective info into monster and item tooltips
• Show the quest level before you accept the quest
• Show other party members' completion of quest objectives (if they have the addon too)
• Optionally (I have this turned off) notify party members in /p chat when you complete a quest.

Check out QuestsFu at WoW Interface.

The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:

• Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
• Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
• Add keybindings for various chat channels.
• Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
  
• Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
• Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
• Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
• Turn on chat logging.
• Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
• Copy text from the chat frame.
• Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)

As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.

I've been putting off writing about this addon, mainly because it's one of the greatest addons out there, so it's hard to do it justice -- what doesn't PitBull do?

Well it won't win the game for you by itself, and its name doesn't really describe anything about it, but other than that it does pretty much anything and everything you could expect from a unit-frames replacement and then some. You can, of course, personalize your unit frames to your heart's content, more than any other unit frames mod I've seen, and that in itself is worth the download. On top of that, though, you get a ton of other features, all of which can be enabled for functionality or disabled for performance, whichever you like. Here are a few of my favorites:

Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away.

I got fed up trying to catch up to people all the time when I wanted to inspect them, so as soon as I realized that an addon could help with this, I adopted it and never went back. SuperInspect has truly been the super hero addon of player inspection because not only does it preserve the inspecting window no matter how far away your target gets, it also gives you a good view of the target's graphical model, whether a player or an NPC. This feature lets you rotate or zoom in on the target model to your heart's content. Just love the look of that monster or enemy player in front of you but can't get close enough without getting attacked? Just use SuperInspect and zoom in!

There are several more features which make SuperInspect feel fleshed out and useful, such as colored borders for displayed items that indicate their quality, and total item bonuses added up from all your target's gear. It can also save the various characters you've looked at in each session so that you can look them up later. Mainly, though, SuperInspect just looks good, with a movable, scalable window, and even a pretty background behind each character that adds that certain flair that all good addons should have.

Here's something I've been looking for for a long time! It's not an addon itself, but it does make the management and upkeep of your addons a lot simpler.

Cairnehoof of Dethecus (US) sent this in to Mike, who kindly sent it my way:

I read your article on wowinsider (big fan btw) about the addon issue in the upcoming patch. I have come across an great application for windows that updates your addons from all the popular sites. Maybe you could share it on the site. I know many people would love it. It's alot better than the one offered on ui.worldofwar.net because it not just download from one site. It is maintained on sourceforge.net and does not contain any malicious code. (I scanned with 3 different anti-virus programs and a anti-spyware one) heres the link if you want to take a look: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wuu

So, armed with that information, I set off to explore WUU.

"www. Buy cheapest WoW gold
pwns4hire. We live to serve your every need!
com And we certainly don't ruin the game for everyone else who just wants to play without cheating."

Ah, gold spam. It's a bigger problem now than ever, and getting bigger every day. I feel like I get an average of one spam whisper per ten minutes when I play my level 70s, and about a mail a day or so. No, it doesn't really cost me anything, but it sure is annoying. Blizzard are allegedly working on some improvements to the situation for 2.1; one rumor says that trial accounts will no longer be able to whisper people who don't have them friended. I don't buy that, since Blizz have said several times that they want trial accounts to convey the full social nature of WoW, but we'll see.

At any rate, there's something you can do about the problem now: SpamSentry. It's a mod that automatically catches and hides spam whispers and emails, and provides a two-click solution for reporting them to GMs (which you should definitely do so they can catch the buggers). It almost makes getting spammed enjoyable, since it's so easy to report and hopefully hinder their foul goals. It plugs in to FuBar and Titan, which is always convenient, and in general is a pleasure to use. Recommended to all who get spammed (but isn't that everyone?).

Download SpamSentry at ui.worldofwar.net
Previously on the Spotlight
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