Chaos is inevitable. Our universe favors the breakdown of everything and anything, with order being held together by the most primitive of bonds, hanging by a thread over our celestial doom. Too high concept? Fine. Sometimes user interfaces get out of control, and there is little to do to stop it besides control whatever amount of chaos we bring about upon ourselves. This week's UI is from Melosh on the Wyrmrest Accord server, who does his best to control the chaos of a large amount of addons while still remaining information-viable. Plus, this topic lets me write blowhard-y introductions.
http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding/UserViewWebsitePage?wid=a104b636d35d762e&pid=98decd045e5cdc69
First, a request. Many people have emailed me and asked if I still do UI renovation-type columns, where people email in their UI and ask for a fix or ideas on how to change something. Of course I do! People have sent in some decent examples of stuff they wanted fixed, but I kept answering them in personal emails, forgetting it might be pretty great for the column. So if you have an interface fixer-upper question you want answered here or want to show us your UI looking for a makeover, send it to me at readerui@wowinsider.com. Yay!
I love your articles! They have helped me work from a super-mess(Wish I still had screen shots!) to this early draft. At the time, I tried to keep everything organized. Unfortunately, even as I slowly reduced the amount of clutter, it was often still very busy in certain situations.
As it stands right now, I have a fairly small UI. I mostly heal 5-mans, but I do occassionally tank/DPS or even raid heal. I needed a UI to adapt to my changing moods. I'm also trying to reduce eye movement. The closer I can look to the center of my screen, the better. Though I DO hate HUDs...
List of Important Addons:
Shadow Unit Frames: Very customizable. I used to use the party frames, but realized that 99% of the time, Grid took care of what I needed. I just recently had it take over for XP-tracking duty. I enjoy it's Holy Power/Combo Points tracking.
Prat/WIM: Really should go without saying at this point, but the
ability to hide tabs and modify the http://goarticles.com/article/4584003 chat frames while keeping Whispers Instant-message style really helps clean up the UI.
Dominos: I hide a few bars on the side of my screen. Things I either
don't access often, or access with mouse button(Mounts).
TinyDPS: I just need a basic DPS tracker with a small footprint, and
this fit it perfectly!
Grid+Clique: I see people talk about it for healing a lot, but Clique is great for DPS too! My mage having Frostbolt to Ctr+Click and Ice Lance to Shift+Click and the like really helps out. I also went out of my way to follow the same bindings across all of my
healers. Example: Basic Heal=Ctr+Click, Dispel=Shift+Click, etc.