New UI Project

So I've been piling addon on top of addon for a while now whenever I come across anything I find useful. I've been using addons since probably pre BC days when I finally got back into the game. I stopped playing for a long time in college, and when I finally got around to playing WotLK my addons were sorely out of date. I started over from scratch by scouring the web for updates for all my old mods. I quickly found that the majority of what I had been using was either out of date or simply had disappeared.

So I started from scratch again with the help of Curse and a few comments on Dwarf Priest. An addon for this, an addon for that, a useful new feature here, a useful new feature there. I soon had a huge pile of addons, addons that I relied on to give me vital data and make playing more fluid. That made playing on two different computers almost unbearable, plus keeping them all up to date was even more of a pain.

Enter Curse Client.

Curse Client was a godsend. All of a sudden all my mods(well most of them) showed up in one easy to scan tab and told me which ones had updates available! All I had to do was click a button and all my mods would be downloaded, extracted, and installed. So simple! Life was grand.

But then I found the search feature. Right from within Curse Client I could add new mods I hadn't been able to find before! The list of mods started growing again.

Then Curse Client ditched me.

Actually they started their premium tier program. In order to use Curse Client like you were familar with you now had to pay for access to the update all button AND for them not to throttle your downloads.

Damn. My ease of updating and keeping track of all my addons started evaporating. I wasn't going to pay for such limited functionality.

About that time one of the sites I had been visiting to update one single addon raised its hand and pointed me to its new little creation. MMOUI Minion.

JOY!!!

Now MMOUI Minion is still offically listed as in Beta status, but it is probably my favorite WoW tool aside from my WoWhead sidebar gadget. The Update All button works exactly like its supposed to plus it doesn't bury Addons it doesnt have mirrors too on another tab. Since it connects into the MMOUI.com database it handles finding new WoW addons pretty well. It also has the potential to handle the Addon managment of other games hosted at MMOUI.

So where does all that lead? To my current problem I have over 70 addons scattered across to UI manager clients. Yes, 70. That number seems dangerously too high for my own tastes. Couple that with the fact that some mods show up only on Curse Client (exclusive hosting) I have to do double work updating and managing. Many of the mods that I update and continue to configure have now been replaced with better versions, enhanced versions, or had their functionality intergrated with something else. A fair number of them are also aimed at the leveling grind.

Its time to prune that tree. I'll be starting to redesign my interface for my new play environment as a shadow priest heroic train member, a disc tank healer, and raid shadow DPS.

I'll be keeping you informed of my progress in case I can develop a UI package that would be useful. My goal is to be able to have a significantly more intuitive and cleaner interface than I do now. The project begins tonight!