Addon Spotlight: AuctionLite
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.
Slightly continuing in the vein of "alternatives to," today's Addon Spotlight looks at an addon that some prefer to the mighty Auctioneer. Auctioneer is one of the all-time great WoW addons; it's been around forever and offers pretty much every auction-related feature you could possibly think of. Unfortunately, massive feature set and good book-keeping facilities come at a cost: system resources. There's no denying that Auctioneer is well up there on the list of mods that use rather a lot of memory and CPU.
Enter AuctionLite. The "lite" applies both to its feature set and its resource footprint. It doesn't cover everything Auctioneer does, but the core use cases, at least for me, are covered:
Track average prices
Suggest prices for listings based on what's on the market right now (undercut)
Rapid listing and buyout
Calculate disenchant prices
Show auctions that look like good deals
I've been using AuctionLite over Auctioneer for the past week or so, and I've been pretty happy with it. The one Auctioneer feature that I really miss is the ability to calculate prospecting and milling prices, too (although the milling price calculation in Auctioneer was never very good, since it checked prices on resultant pigments instead of on ink).
I also like the interface of AuctionLite better. There were a few features I couldn't figure out how to use without looking at the help on the Curse description page, like buying out multiple auctions at once, and it took me a little longer to list auctions as compared to Auctioneer. However, scanning was much faster (even faster than Auctioneer's newish turbo scan thingy), completing in 10 seconds or so for me, and overall it's a trade-off that I'm more than willing to make for AuctionLite's smaller footprint and more usable auction panel.
There are also two very useful features that AuctionLite has but Auctioneer doesn't (at least as far as I know; Auctioneer is large and sprawling and I'm sure I don't know every feature of it).
Buying by quantity. If you know you want (say) 12 Dream Shards, AuctionLite will offer to find a collection of auctions to get you 12 shards at the best price. If that entails buying more than you wanted, it'll estimate how much you'll be able to resell the excess for, and your net cost (pictured above).
Alternate between single price and stack price in tooltips by pressing Shift. I find a need for this much more often than you might think.
So if you fall on the more casual end of the Auctioneer user base, don't need the most advanced features, or want something a little easier to use that won't put a drag on your system, or if you like the sound of AuctionLite's nifty new features, you might want to give it a try. And to MerialKilrogg, whom Curse lists as the developer of AuctionLite: prospecting and milling prices, please? Heck, I've been wanting to get into addon development; maybe I'll just do it myself. After the semester, that is.
[thanks, Merial]
Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. Need a bar mod? Want to quickly compare pieces of gear? Covered. And if you have any ideas for mods we should take a look at, drop us a line.
