Addon Spotlight: QBar
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.
It has two flaws, that I see. One is that it is not skinnable via ButtonFacade. This is not a huge deal for me, because I tend to keep default button skins on my bars, but it would be nice to have so that those who do customize their button skins can have consistency. Edit: Apparently there is a separate plug in, QBar ButtonFacade, that solves this very problem. Thanks, Archaenos.
The second, and the one that bothers me, is that the bar expands from the middle, instead of going either left or right. This does not appear to be configurable. The reason this is a problem for me is that I like to put QBar off to the right of my Dominos bars, and when I have a lot of quest items, it overlaps my last few hotkeys. The only way I could avoid this would be to put it on top of all my bars, but I like to keep that space clear for casting bars and other stuff. It would be nice if I could set the direction in which the bar expands. Add that, Aezay, and your mod will be pretty close to perfect in my eyes
Either way, it's very useful, visually unobtrusive, and doesn't use a lot of system resources. That gives it a place on my list of mods no-one should be without.
Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. Need a bar mod? Having trouble keeping track of achievements? We've got your back. And if you have any ideas for mods we should take a look at, drop us a line.
