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Addon Spotlight: Work harder with GnomeWorks
Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, GnomeWorks is to trade skills what fire was to cavemen. These past few weeks have been very good in the old email box for suggestions for addons to be featured on Addon Spotlight, so keep those recommendations coming. In the next few weeks, I've got a recommendation spotlight planned as well as a grab bag. Also, there is an idea kicking around in my head about a "my first addon" spotlight, where new addon developers pitch their addon and we talk about it constructively. What do you guys think? Today's Addon Spotlight is one of those "long time coming" pieces; people were utterly shocked over the fact that I had not talked about GnomeWorks before. Well, there is a good reason for that -- GnomeWorks is still in its alpha development stage. As far as profession windows go, prior to Cataclysm, an addon of this type was almost required. The sorting features and customization options on the default profession window was lackluster at best.
Addon Spotlight: Prat (and PitBull_Prat)
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.
