Winter Addon Roundup: Action Bars

Ah winter... the time when the weather turns cold and hostile, giving gamers everywhere a perfect excuse for spending long hours indoors playing video games. Of course, you want this time to be as pleasant as possible which means not spending long hours trying to evaluate a bunch of new addons for WoW, so I'm going to list a bunch for you that should help you make the most of your play time.

(By the way, I'm not yet certain if I'm going to be doing this monthly or merely quarterly, but since this is the first one I'm not entirely sure it matters.)

We'll start with Action Bars... You know, the things that keep you from having to open the spellbook every time you want to cast a spell or use a special ability.

Macaroon
Back before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, possibly the most popular action bar addon was Trinity. It had a few minor bugs here and there (mainly misspellings) but with the latest expansion, the author of Trinity wanted to just start over and created Macaroon. Macaroon basically comes in two pieces now, Macaroon and Macaroon Xtras. If you just want new action bars, then you don't need the Xtras package. If you intend to install Macaroon and then disable Blizzard's default button bar at the bottom (which most people do) you'll want the Xtras package as it also gives you customizable bag bars, tool icon bars, and XP/reputation bars. Either way, once it's installed you'll have a small orange candy-like icon hanging off your mini-map which lets you begin creating and editing button bars.

• Macaroon v30000.28.1 (11/4/2008)
• Macaroon Xtras v30000.11 (11/3/2008)
  

For those of you new to using Macaroon, by default it creates no bars so you'll have to create some (using the minimap menu) first. New bars by default have no buttons, so you'll then want to right-click on the new bar and select Button Count to add some buttons to the new bar. Read the tooltips Macaroon shows you carefully so you'll know which buttons on the mouse make what change and you should be fine. The command line invocation for Macaroon is simply "/mac". Try to remember it because you might need it.

You will also need to create a new bar, add about six empty buttons, and make it a "posess" bar by ticking the radio button that appears when you right click the bar in edit mode. This will make it disappear at any time except when you are "posessing" a vehicle or NPC. It'll still appear temporarily when you go into edit mode, but for the most part you won't see it again until you need it. Unlike the default UI there will be no "dismount vehicle" button so you'll have to click on the vehicles unit frame (portrait) and select Leave Vehicle from there. Because you won't often see it, I suggest adjusting your possession bar so that it's 25-30% larger than your other bars, and sits somewhere prominent near the bottom center of your screen.

Be careful that if you install Macaroon Xtras you don't load the Macaroon Cast Bar module (click the Addons button on the lower left of the Character Selection screen) if you are using Quartz. They won't conflict or anything, but two cast bars on the screen at once is wasteful and ugly and Quartz is much prettier.

ButtonFacade
Once you've got new Action Bars on your screen making your life easier, you might want to change they way they look a bit as well. ButtonFacade makes this happen. The command line invocation for ButtonFacade is (unsuprisingly) simply "/bf". ButtonFacade can only change the appearance of buttons for addons that have support for it, so if you've got some addon it doesn't work with don't blame ButtonFacade. Trinity (before it became Macaroon) had a number of skins for it, so I'm also going to list the package that gets you those back again.

• ButtonFacade v3.0r172 (10/23/2008)
• ButtonFacade: Trinity v30000.1 (10/14/2008)
• ButtonFacade: Gears v3.0.2.2 (10/25/2008)
  
• ButtonFacade: Entropy v3.0.2.2 (10/25/2008)