Got UI?

The first time I got asked that I was hugely confused. I know what UI stands for, user interface. So of course I have UI, I"m playing in it. Then I found out what it means inside MMORPG land, in this case, WoW, where it is also often referred to as addons

The client for WoW is written in XML and is therefore, extensible. A huge, and I do mean huge, developer community has arisen around WoW (and around other such games), working with support and encouragement from the game devs, to develop additional features for the client software.

It reminds me of the old days of computer OS, when developer community folks would construct useful widgets, INITS, that we'd all find, swap, and install in our system to facilitate the navigation and improve the useability of the standard interface.

At any rate, I got myself some UI/addons. It's interesting to look at the code. It's very simple and readable. I'm thinking, jees, I could do this if I bothered to learn the primitives and syntax. Pretty straight forward stuff. Anyhow, I got a shard management system for warlocks that hangs on the side of my mini-map. It sorts and counts soul shards in my bags. It also reminds me of cool down times for shard-related casts, such as soulstone, firestone, and healthstone. I also grabbed a more generally useful addon that posts the x,y coordinates of my current position. THis is very useful because a lot of the quest info on WoW db sites anchors information with x,y coordinates.

Two primo sites for UI/addons are listed in the links panel. I'll post a snap of the mini-map with addons when the Moon server is back up.