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AddOn Spotlight: AutoProfit
One of my favorite little add-ons, AutoProfit does one thing and it does it well. When you click the stacks-o-gold icon that it adds to vendor windows, it automagically sells all your gray items (aka vendor trash) to the vendor. It's customizable, so you can tell it to hold on to certain gray items or conversely to sell certain non-gray items (Fish Oil, anyone?). It also tells you how much all your junk loot adds up to when you mouse over the sell-all button, and let me tell you, there's nothing like making a few gold in junk rocks off elementals in the Badlands to make late-40s grinding feel a little more pleasant. Since getting this little baby, manually clicking on 37 items after having moused over my entire inventory to seem what's salable seems like such a chore. This is one of those "should be in the default UI" things. Download it at Curse; it's updated for 2.0.1.
Scrambling for new mods on raid night
Hindsight is 20/20, so if you're telling me it was a bad idea to plan an MC raid the night after the 2.0.1 patch, I now see that you were probably right. My guild is getting ready to raid tonight, and not only are we now contending with rolling restarts (they're hitting all realms to "hotfix" a critical bug), but we're scrambling to get our interfaces back to the point where we can actually use them.The problem, however, is that as of right now, Curse Gaming's website is spotty at best-- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it works, their 2.0 page is the place to go for the new addons, so that's probably the first place you can stop. CTRaid, fortunately, is hosted elsewhere, and they had their 2.0 release ready to go (there was a quick fix last night, but the current version works swimmingly). CastParty is hosted over at Sourceforge, so while you can download their 4.3 version, I put it in, and it is incompatible with WoW 2.0 (bummer). And for the worst news of all: Auctioneer's authors are busy with schoolwork, and so their new versions won't be coming out for... another two weeks.Unfortunately, with Benecast, CastParty and redHeart out of the 2.0.1 mix, I haven't found a clickheal mod that works. That's what we suspected when we first mentioned the addon apocalypse, but does this mean clickhealing is gone forever? Will we all have to face the music and live without the mods we've come to know and love? For the time being, seems so. If you've found an updated version of a mod you use, or are even an author of an updated mod, feel free to post in the comments and let us know where to go. Our servers' back up-- with or without mods, Domo's going down.Update: MC didn't work as planned. With new talents, messed up mods and bugged interfaces, we threw in the towel early. One the mages were really missing is Decursive. There is supposed to be an updated version out, but not confirmed if it works or not-- anyone try it?Update2: More mod updates.
201 issues in 2.0.1
OK, well maybe there's not exactly that many issues, but there's quite a few floating around with the new patch today. No Arena masters, for one. Here's a few more I've heard about so far. Druids are just plain confused. The patch notes had tons of changes for them, but it looks like only two showed up in the actual patch, the Omen of Clarity buff and Swiftmend. What's up with that? The devs are saying the patch notes are wrong, and there's no word about whether an update will change things later. A lot of druids are confused about it, and rightfully so-- why put stuff in the patch notes that doesn't get implemented? There's crazy addon issues, for sure. None of my addons worked at all (they didn't just say "out of date", they actually said "incompatible"), and for a lot of major addons there's no word yet when an update is forthcoming. We knew this would happen, but it still sucks, especially for guilds like mine who plan to raid tomorrow. The LFG interface is cool, but there's a few kinks in it, most notably that I couldn't seem to join a group for lower level instances on my 60. If I have a quest in Sunken Temple or Maraudon, why can't I find a group for it? Also, it appears (confirmation on this?) that the raids aren't in the LFG interface either. The stealth animations were speed increased (walking speed in stealth), but frankly it looks like characters are "doing the pee pee dance"-- they're jerky and wrong. Petition has been started on the rogue forums to fix them. Appears that because of the changes to thrown items (they don't stack-- instead they lose durability when used), equipped thrown items have disappeared forever. Finally, this isn't Blizzard's fault, but the battleground servers are being obliterated right now with all the people jumping in to try out their new specs. I was in Arathi Basin 167, and it lasted for all of three minutes before it froze up, flipped over, and died on the spot. On the flip side, there is a lot of good coming out of the patch: Pallys are thrilled, and while Druids are a little unhappy, they do like that treeform. I've already seen a few Shamans walking around dual wielding (I had to stay Resto, unfortunately, so no DW for me until the expansion). Warriors, from what I've heard, are happier than they thought they would be with rage normalization (their new talents helped a bit). Priests have some new tricks up their sleeve, as do Hunters. Locks still own. And it seems true that no matter what this patch does, it will definitely breathe some new life into a game that a lot of people were getting bored of. There may be 201 problems, but players not playing tonight ain't one.
Curse Gaming site revamp
The new patch is coming this Tuesday to a realm near you, and when you run off to find updated versions of your latest addons, you may be in for a surprise -- because favorite addon site Curse Gaming has undergone a complete redesign. (If you're trying to find the addon section of the site from the main page, it's a big purple button on the right.) Their addons section looks quite a bit different and no longer sorts addons by familiar categories -- instead, there appears to be one giant list of addons, which is searchable by labels attached to the addon. For better or for worse, the new layout is going to take some getting used to -- and I can only again encourage everyone to go and download addon updates in advance of Tuesday's patch!
The coming addon apocalypse
While we've talked about this before, but with the announcement of the patch 2.0.1 rollout, it's worth a reminder. On December 5th, 2006, you'll log on to World of Warcraft and download the 2.0.1 patch -- and then all of your addons will stop working. I know what you're thinking, "But Elizabeth! There are addon issues with every patch! How will this be any different?" Well, WoW 2.0 completely changes the LUA code that current addons are written in, or, as Blizzard puts it:WoW 2.0 represents a major change in the UI code, and as such ALL AddOns will need to be updated before they will work, if for no other reason than the Lua 5.0 to Lua 5.1 changes. Some AddOns will be more seriously affected, and a few will have to be redesigned.Tobold predicts -- not inaccurately, I think -- disaster. As everyone begins to realize their addons are no longer functioning, they'll rush to Curse Gaming and WoWInterface. These sites, always sluggish on or around patch day, will all the worse for the complete failure of every addon that currently exists. Some addons will be abandoned by their authors, as the work to rewrite them would be too great. Others will be abandoned because the ability to make them functional will no longer exist. And yet others will simply take time to rewrite and not be immediately available.So what's to be done? Well, you could always stop using addons. Or take a week's vacation from the game. Or if you aren't willing to do either of those, check up on your addons in advance -- look them up and see if there's a WoW 2.0 version already available. (If you don't remember where you downloaded it from, use the search functionality on Curse Gaming or WoWInterface to find them.) If not, WoWInterface has lists of mods that are confirmed to work with the 2.0.1 patch, so perhaps you can find something you could live with (don't try to use any of these with the live game, however -- they won't work). So while everyone else you know is tearing their hair out in frustration trying to find working addons while Curse Gaming is down, you can be sitting back in your chair, sipping a martini* and raiding the night away. * No, the patch does not ship standard with martini. You're on your own Mr. Bond.
AddOn Spotlight: Buttons, more buttons!
For me, the first real push to use addons came when I discovered I had no place to put new skills on the default toolbar. Yes, you can add several additional rows of buttons in the default UI (via interface options) but their location and size are set. I didn't like the amount of space they took up, so I looked for more flexible options. As I imagine many are struck with the same difficulty at some point in the game, today I'll go over the most popular button mods -- and maybe you, too, can twink your interface to perfection!
AddOn Spotlight: LootLink
Regardless of how long you've played, I'm sure you've run into LootLink at some point or other. LootLink is an in-game item database that's populated as you encounter new items in Azeroth. It's searchable, and the items within the database can be linked in game to other players. (Yes, this is how you end up with countless linkings and relinkings of every new and awesome piece of gear in the game.) However, besides the infinite amounts of fun you can have with this mod by playing around in the dressing room or teasing your friends with epic items, there's some good utility to this mod as well -- though perhaps it's just my poor memory that makes me say that.Have a favorite mod, or a unique mod you can't live without? Send us a tip and maybe it will wind up in our next AddOn Spotlight!
AddOn Spotlight: TheoryCraft
I'm always a fan of more data. The default interface only provides very basic information about your spells and abilities, and as the base abilities are modified more heavily by gear, it becomes impossible to determine what exactly your abilities are doing for you without the help of a calculator and several pages of notes. This is why I like the TheoryCraft mod that I ran across on Curse Gaming, which gives at-a-glance info on what all of my spells hit for right on my toolbar, as well as providing more detailed tooltip information. And, while I'm looking at it as a caster, it provides equal amounts of information for physical damage-dealers, giving an average damage per attack (and other statistics) based on equipped gear. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to switching out gear and staring at numbers...
Organizing raids with Raidar
Raidar is a neat little site that claims to let players plan and organize guild raids in WoW. It's pretty clear the site is new, so it's not completely done yet (not to mention that almost no guilds are in the system at all), but in my few minutes' experience signing in, creating a guild, and setting up a raid, it all worked pretty smoothly (and AJAX-y, if you're a web designer into terms like that-- the site works like it was built in Ruby on Rails).So what's still missing? The "planned features" page promises a top-to-bottom guild management system, incluing email raid notifications, character profiles, and even a "Looking for Guild" board. The one thing I missed in setting up a was the ability to set up numbers for class balance on a raid, but over on the site's message board, the creator says that wasn't a priority for him quite yet (seems to me like it would be a big one). But as I said, the site looks smooth-- if he keeps up with it and throws in all the features he promised, it could be the place for raid planners to set up on the Internet.And as far as I know, there is still a hole for one right now. One of my guilds simply uses our Guildportal message boards to set up and plan raids-- members sign up on the board, and our guild leader keeps track of who signs up and who we need. I know Guildportal has a system for it as well, but none of our members seem to have be interested in using it yet. The other guild I'm in, which is a little bigger, uses the Guild Event Manager addon to announce and plan raids ingame. I do like the way GEM works-- it's easy to use and set up, has that min/max feature that I want from Raidar, and keeps up a constant list of who's signed up for a raid in what class roles.But the only real problem with GEM is that, as far as I know, it's ingame only. There's no way for me to check when a raid is or sign up for one unless I'm in-game (not always an option, especially at work). If Raidar can fill out its features, and do the same thing that GEM does (but from anywhere), we might have a winner.
AddOn Spotlight: Lizzy's interface
My horde priest, Lizzy, is the level 60 I play most often (though frequently, time limitations mean I'll end up playing alts for a half an hour here or there), but the interfaces of all my characters are mirrored off the needs of this one priest. I try to keep things simple -- which makes patch day a lot easier. So if you're curious as to what all is cluttering my screen, keep reading!
Breakfast Topic: Addon changes in the Burning Crusade
The recent announcement of major addon changes coming with the release of the Burning Crusade has caused an uproar on the official forums. Many applaud it -- saying it stops lazy or skill-less players from playing the game on easy mode. But many also decry the changes -- saying that it only serves to increase the portion of the game that is tedious and dull. So this morning's question is this -- which side are you on? Are you glad to see decursive go? Or will you miss it? (For my own part, I'm worried -- I have to yell often enough at the mages to decurse the main tank even when they do have decursive. How will I ever teach them to target-and-decurse when I can't even get them to one-click decurse?!)
Huge addon changes in the Burning Crusade
A reeeally interesting post has appeared on the UI and Addon forums. There's a little flattery in there to butter up the UI Addon community, but then the bombshell hits: in the Burning Crusade, UI addons will not be capable of casting spells or targeting units.Ummm yeah. Goodbye Decursive. So long Panza, Benecast, and CastParty. So long one-click heals of any kind. So long almost every UI addon that's required by most guilds for endgame raiding. According to the post, most of the addons you know and love won't be allowed after they run the patch on the expansion.Now, there might be a little bit of leeway on this. Some "popular and benign UI mods" will be allowed to "take advantage of new functionality" being built into the expansion. So it's possible, depending on your reading, that mods like CT_raid (which really should have been built into the game in the first place, if you ask me) will be allowed to exist. But there's no telling at this point what this "new functionality" does. And since Blizzard doesn't elaborate on which mods cross the line-- is spamming Decursive their idea of cheating? How about clicking off debuffs person by person with CastParty?-- this little post doesn't really do much more than throw things up in the air.And there's no telling where they will land. Expect an outcry from the UI community over the next week or so, or at least until they can figure out what's happening. If there's a way around it, this may not be as big as it seems. But if Blizzard is really serious about shutting down some of these addons, not only will raiding grow a whole lot harder overnight, but the addon community (which has done a lot of great, hard work for Blizzard, without pay) might be affected irrevocably.[ Thanks, Owlboy! ]Update: Blue is answering some questions in this official thread. Basically, any mod that lets you click one button to do different things (Decursive) is out. Whatever you're clicking is not allowed to choose a spell for you. Now, I have zero experience with UI coding, so if someone else can explain it better, please do. But the fact remains that Blizzard is cracking down on a segment of the UI community, and it's likely to change the way almost everybody operates, especially in a raiding environment.
Hawk Wings updates an already massive Mail plugin list
We mention Hawk Wings from time to time here on TUAW, as it's a great blog for all things Mail.app. One handy resource of Tim Gaden's Mail-obsessed blog that not everyone knows about, however, is its ever-growing directory of plugins, in which Tim relentlessly tracks and categorizes all the 3rd party add-ons, scripts, haxies, tweaks and other Mail goodies. The list was recently updated with 10 new entries, ranging from Note to Self (inspired by Leopard's Mail.app Notes feature) and a Return Receipts AppleScript (you know, that feature where you can bug email recipients with a 'yes I read this' dialog) to a Mail to Yojimbo script for those times when the 'print to Yojimbo' service is less than convenient.Check out the recent update and the full plugin directory for virtually any and every tool you could need to make Mail.app bend to your every whim.
On the Firefox 2.0 beta, extensions and compatibility
If you want to play with the Firefox betas, but don't want to break your existing extensions, there is an add-on available that can bring your existing extensions along for the 2.0 beta ride. Nightly Tester Tools is an add-on (extensions are being rebranded as 'add-ons' in the new Firefox) that brings a number of developer-related features to Firefox, but it does two fantastic things for regular end users like you and I: it can make *most* extensions/add-ons work with versions of Firefox they weren't necessarily meant to, even new ones you want to install.Long story short: the way I understand it, Firefox add-ons need to specify which version of Firefox they're compatible with, in case there is version-specific code they require to function. Most add-ons, however, don't have that version-specific code, so Nightly Tester Tools (basically speaking) futzes with add-on version lists so (ideally) more recent versions of Firefox - i.e. this shiny new 2.0 release - can use these add-ons just fine. The one catch I've personally run into is that it seems Nightly Tester Tools needs to be installed on a v1.5.x of Firefox in order to be able to work with v2.0 (ironic, isn't it?). I stumbled across this because I recently wiped my MacBook Pro and reinstalled Mac OS X (I needed to start from scratch to get that new version of Vista running on my MBP). Along with this fresh system, I tried installing Nightly Tester Tools into a Firefox 2.0 beta, and it wouldn't budge. Turns out I had to degrade to 1.5.x, install Nightly Tester Tools, then bump up to 2.0, but YMMV.I need to give a shout out to Download Squad, as it is they who first found this add-on which makes playing with Firefox betas so much sweeter.
Essential Addons for the Discerning Level 60
Seeing as my Shaman (Shamanic on Thunderhorn, by the way, in case you want to say hi) is finally about to hit 60 and start raiding, I figured that now might be a good time to sit down and update and refresh my UI addons, something I haven't done for a patch or two now. So I monitored my play habits for a little while, checked in with guildies for their recommendations, and in the end, these are the five addons I decided were necessary to put in my /Interface folder. -Titan Panel: If I was only going to put one addon in, this would be the one I use. Titan creates an extra bar at the top or bottom of your screen (on my setup, I actually have it in both places) that tracks all kinds of things for you: time played, XP/hour, Durability, stat buffs, FPS, game memory usage-- pretty much everything about your WoW experience you'd ever want to know (it also will tell you the coordinates of your position in the game-- extremely useful for getting around Azeroth). Titan, like the famous CTmod (which I tried but didn't like as much), is so complex there's even addons for the addon. If you've never tried a meta-addon like Titan, definitely give it a try. Four more after the jump...
Download.com posts list of top iTunes add-ons
I could've sworn that Download.com got rid of their Mac software section a while ago, but alas: digg submissions never lie. CNET's Download.com has posted a list of top iTunes add-ons for tackling everything from grabbing album art to watching who is listening to which songs from your library. Included in the list is RadioLover which lets you record streaming radio, as well as iPodRip with (thankfully) an accurate explanation as to why its abilities aren't included in iTunes itself. This list actually part of a guide Download.com wrote called iTunes Advanced, which includes some handy tips for things like adding an equalizer column to your list of songs to easily assign custom EQ settings to specific songs, as well as a list of hotkeys for the default iTunes visualization mode.Seasoned iTunes pros will probably balk at getting iTunes advice from Download.com, but there are probably at least a couple handy tidbits here for just about everyone.
Breakfast Topic: To Addon or Not to Addon?
I spent a while on the test realms yesterday checking out all of the new goodies in the 1.12 client. Some of these, like the new floating combat text feature, have come directly from popular community-created addons. I think, in may ways, I prefer the addons that are integrated game - that way, come patch day, the features I use regularly simply work, without need to tinker or download new code. However, custom addons provide a level of flexibility that's not present in Blizzard's own UI. With floating combat text, specifically, I may continue to use the original addon - Scrolling Combat Text - because I prefer being able to customize a little more than Blizzard's addition allows me to. And what about all of you? Do you like to use addons - or even the sort that can't play when their addons aren't working right? Or do you prefer the low-maintenance of the default UI? And, whichever side you're on, do you like or dislike these new additions to the default UI?
A collection of all available QuickPicks for Backup 3
Wishingline, a web design studio, has done .Mac members a favor and collected most of the QuickPicks that are available on the web for Apple's Backup 3. There are quite a few QuickPicks out there for everything from ecto to PDF documents, Photo Booth pictures to Shiira bookmarks, OmniOutliner documents and much, much more. Wishingline went so far as to list a number of the QuickPicks individually, or simply offer an encompassing package of everything they could find (scroll down about midway on the page for these goodies).The QuickPicks package is offered free from Wishingline, but remember: they didn't have anything to do with creating these (as far as I know); they just tracked them down and zipped them. If you want a QuickPick for one app or another, you should probably consult the app's author or check out these resources for creating your own.[UPDATE: Scott from Wishingline dropped us a comment to let us know that the QuickPicks linked from Wishingline are, in fact, home grown. Thanks for some rockin' QuickPicks Scott!]
Quicksilver plug-ins for Google Calendar and Gmail
While tinkering in Quicksilver's plug-ins panel this morning I came across two new plug-ins that should fit right in with my new Borg Google-infused daily activities: a Gmail Module and a Google Calendar Module. Both are actions that allow you to type in a string of text, then select either of these modules as an action, and off you go.The Google Calendar module seems to use their Quick Add syntax for adding events. For a quick tutorial on this: invoke Quicksilver and then hit period so you can begin entering plain text. Enter something like "Apple Store Opening Saturday 10 am," then hit tab to move to Quicksilver's second pane to chose an action. If you have the Google Calendar module installed, the action is titled "Google Calendar Event" (using 'gcal' works just fine for me). Hitting enter will send the event, and for bonus points, if you have Growl installed and Quicksilver using it to give notifications, you'll receive a Growl alert upon successful completion.The Gmail module (pictured) allows you to compose a message (or at least part of one) using the same method as both the Google Calendar and Mail.app compose actions. Once you type some text, tab over to chose the Gmail action, you'll receive a 3rd pane that allows you to specify an Address Book contact to send to. Hitting enter will create a Gmail compose window with all the information you chose from Quicksilver already inserted. Awesome.
Chax 1.4.1 released
One thing I love about Chax, the vital iChat plug-in, is that its developer has been reliably rolling out a good handful of new features and fixes, even with a .0.x update like this one. New features in 1.4.1 include: Growl notifications for when a user comes online, goes offline, goes idle, goes away, and becomes available Options to have the tab window come to the front when receiving a new message Option to disable the close buttons on tabs Option to have the contact lists automatically resize to fit the number of visible contacts Contact list row height will now adjust itself according to the size of a custom font as long as user icons are hidden (the two line view will not resize) Default iChat floating window notifications now work with tabs Clicking on a Growl message notification will bring iChat to the front and select the originating message window You can check out the full list of new features and bug fixes in Chax's release notes, and grab your own copy from Kent Sutherland's site.
