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Posts with tag pitbull

New UI woes

Posted Mar 22nd 2008 3:00PM by Alex Ziebart
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends

I have a confession: I've been mostly using the basic, vanilla UI for as long as I have been playing WoW. I do use mods, I'm not crazy, but the basic unit frames and action bars have served me pretty well.

It's not that I dislike custom UIs, or even that I do like the basic UI. The base interface has done its job, from level 1 in Northshire Abbey to level 70 standing on top of Illidan's corpse. It took that Illidan kill to make me realize that I did it the entire way using a supposedly inferior UI. I could do so much more! I could streamline everything, I could open up space on my screen, remove unnecessary information, enhance the necessary stuff...

Wow, this has turned out to be quite a task. My experience with these things is minimal, and I'm not always the most organized person in the world so I couldn't make myself a proper layout if I tried. Even worse is I need to redesign my UI on all of my characters because they all use different things. What's important to my Shadow Priest isn't important to my Protection Paladin, and what's important to her isn't important to my Rogue.

Continue reading New UI woes

Addon Spotlight: Prat (and PitBull_Prat)

Posted Jul 22nd 2007 8:50PM by David Bowers
Filed under: Tips, AddOns, AddOn Spotlight

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.

Shifting Perspectives: Some handy addons for your druid

Posted Jul 17th 2007 2:07PM by David Bowers
Filed under: Druid, AddOns, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives


Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by Dan O'Halloran and David Bowers.

Two weeks ago we had a look at how macros could make your druid lifestyle a little easier, and today we're going to look at some addons which were specially made for druids. These addons help you solve a couple problems that many druids are likely to face, helping you get at important druid information that isn't easily available in the standard interface.

First is the problem of druid mana while in feral forms. It's tricky to keep track of this without any addons; you have to remember your mana in your mind while you look at your rage or energy bar and do other things. Sometimes you might shift out of a feral form to cast a heal only to find yourself without enough mana to do what you had planned. There are actually several addons which can help you with this, and we'll take a brief look at each of them so that you can choose which is best for you.

The second problem has to do with comparing the best druid gear without having to shift out of World-of-Warcraft form and into Browse-the-internet-for-15-minutes form. Several addons are out there which can give you the lowdown on gear quality right in your item tooltips.

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Some handy addons for your druid

Addon Spotlight: SharedMedia (and other addon updates)

Posted Jul 8th 2007 9:49PM by David Bowers
Filed under: AddOns, AddOn Spotlight

In the last few weeks we've covered some very useful and beautiful addons that work with the Ace2 framework to provide customizable flexibility to otherwise static elements in the game, such as unit frames and nameplates. This week's addon integrates with PitBull and Aloft as well as many other Ace addons, to give you more choices for the graphical bars and fonts that appear. Simply install SharedMedia and the additional choices will become available to you when you select textures and fonts in the other Ace2 addons. Some of my own are pictured here, with PitBull and Aloft. SharedMedia is not essential obviously, and it doesn't win the game for you, but it immensely enhances the inherent beauty that I love about the World of Warcraft visual experience.

I couldn't find an actual download page for Shared Media, but it is available from files.wowace.com in two parts, which you can download directly here: SharedMedia, and SharedMediaLib.
Click on the link below to read about other addon updates related to inspecting and unit frames:

Continue reading Addon Spotlight: SharedMedia (and other addon updates)

Addon Spotlight: PitBull

Posted Jul 1st 2007 2:05PM by David Bowers
Filed under: AddOns, AddOn Spotlight

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:

Continue reading Addon Spotlight: PitBull


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