Personalizing Your UI: Part 2

 

Modding gone horribly wrong. Courtsey of Techchee.com

 

 

Personalizing your UI is about more than good looks, its about convenience. This time around I am going to show you some great add-ons that are not flashy but get the job done right. This includes chat, inventory management, and auction house mods that will help you to use your play time more efficiently and make it more profitable.

Chat Add-ons:

In game chat can sometimes be tedious and even irritating. If you have ever been in trade chat during a murloc/chuck norris/anal spamfest then you know what I am talking about. However, Warcraft’s chat can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it correctly.

At the time of this post I was using ChatMOD as my only chat add-on. It has been an excellent add-on that has provided me with everything I thought I needed out of a chat mod. This includes the ability to easily join/leave, colorize, and organize channels. It gives users the ability to scroll up the window using a mousewheel and remove the default scroll buttons. ChatMOD can add sound effects to notify when a message has been received from group, raid, guild, or whisper. And finally, it gives you the ability to click on the word invite or inv to invite the whisperer into a group or raid.

The one thing that seems to be missing from ChatMOD was more customization options for whispers. Whispers are independent from the rest of the random, meaningless chat that often flies by and require special attention. For this reason I decided to try out WIM. (WoW Instant Messenger) At first glance I did not like this add-on at all. It seemed bulky and literally felt like a program was opening on top of WoW. However,  after using it for a few hours I saw that it was useful and convenient with many customization options that made have a 1 on 1 conversation easier. 

This is a multi conversation chat panel. The tabs at the top control each of the seperate conversations.

 

This is the options interface for WoW Instant Messenger.

An additional feature is the History Viewer, which is really nice so going back to see if you missed a message from a friend.

 

In researching this post I also tried using Chatter,  which is currently the highest rated chat mod available, and Chatr, a relatively new chat mod. Chatter had more customization options than ChatMod but the bugginess and semi-intimidating configuration menu left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Overall, neither Chatter or Chatr seemed to do anything that ChatMod couldn’t do. so if you are looking for a simple, light, chad mod I suggests ChatMOD. For experienced modders, give Chatter a try.

Another aspect of chat is who you are talking to. I found several options for friends list available, but ended up with FriendFu, a FuBar add-on. FriendFu seems to do everything a person could want out of a friends list with actually having to bring up your friends list. You just scroll over the icon in your FuBar to bring up a list of friends.

On a side note, Carbonite, which is a questing add-on I use already, includes many friends list features that may be enough without wasting more memory.

 

Main options menu for ChatMOD

 

Sound options for warnings.

Channel options

The menu is for a cool feature that highlights words of interest that scroll by.

Bag Add-ons:

Bag add-ons are another set of mods that can be almost limitlessly useful even though most people just use them to turn all of their bags into one bigger bag. I have used Bagnon, Ark Inventory, Onebag, and several others. Each of these mods has its specialty or area in which it excells. Bagnon is a great lightweight mod that has all of the basic options such as changing size, color, and opacity. Not to mention the ability to see what all of you other characters are carrying without logging over. Unlike Onebag, which is also a lightweight bag mod, you get the bank mod included.

Onebag is similar is most ways and adds a few options for sorting items, but you must also download Onebank for your bank bags.

In my opinion, the best bang for your buck is Ark Inventory. Immeadiantly after installing, the default bags look horrible and are huge, taking up a third of my 1920×1080 screen. However, typing /arkinventory config brings up a simple options screen that has everything you need to customize your bags in whatever way is useful to you. My favorite thing about Ark Inventory though, is the bag customizing. This options lets you set types of items that go in imaginary bags. This means you can set a bag to be for gear and the mod creates a space for all of the gear you currently have in your bags. This option is great for reagents, quest item, and off sets that just get mixed up and hard to find in one big bag.

My bags seperated by category. Ark auto places my reagents in the first bag, my gear in the second bag, and so forth. If you fill a bag Ark allocates more slots to that bag.

 

Main options menu for Ark Inventory

Options for automatic bag opening

Options by bag type

Bag color and size options

Auction House Add-ons:

I actually regret having added this into Personalizing Your UI because the amount of detail and options make this a topic that I could not completely cover in several posts. Not to mention that there are a very large number of add-ons that are cover all sorts of auction house related issues that can be really useful but are not actually ah mods. So to keep things short I covered 3 ah add-ons that I think cover the widest range of and most popular features of a good ah mod.

The first I tested was Auctioneer and was impressed with the options and speed at which it allowed me to list items.Using with Auctioneer was kinda like getting addicted to crack. I couldnt stop playing with it and kept finding new add-on that worked with it. One example of the really useful add-ons is Enchantrix, which tells you what an item will disenchant into. When I uninstalled Auctioneer to test the other add-ons I lost the ability to use these other great features and felt like someone had cut off my hand. Luckily, both other ah add-ons had built in features that were similar to, though not as good as the ones that come with Auctioneer. The real benefit was that my loading times dropped signifigantly when uninstalling Auctioneer and switching to AuctionLite. I found AuctionLite to be pretty much perfect for what I need when trying to play the ah game. Its easy to use and  has great buying and selling options, including the ability to auto buy a certain amount of items. If this feature has to purchase extra to get the amount you wanted, it tells you how much you can resell the extra items for.

Auctionator was very similar to AuctionLite but just felt inferior in its presentation. It did have all of the basic features and was more memory efficent than Auctioneer.

 

The detailed view of the auction house interface.

A breakdown of features from the basic auction house interface, courtesy of the Auctioneer website

This is a view of an item tooltip using all of the Auctioneer accompanying add-ons. The name of each addon is listed below.

 As you probably noticed I didnt go into a lot of detail regarding each add-ons setup and confiugurations. Instead I will be linking to other articles, posts and videos that give specifics and attention to detial that I did not have time for. Please see the Add-Ons page at the top of the screen for links to this information. Stayed tuned till next week and I will wrap up my Personalizing Your UI post with Part 3 on map, loot, and raid mods.

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