Reader UI of the Week: We've come a long way, baby

A little while back, I put out the call for UIs with a bit of history, a bit of evolution to them. I love seeing how my UI has evolved over the years, starting off with the basic Blizzard UI, until I realised that I could tinker with the overall scale, and then began adding unit frame addons, then action bar addons, castbar addons, and the whole thing got completely out of hand and escalated to the point where I started writing addon and UI columns for WoW Insider! And it's always interesting to see how others' UIs have developed, too.

Today, we're delving into the past and present of Alphabot's UI. He's sent over several pictures, of both his current UI and his UIs past. So here, in chronological order, are UI shots one, two, three, four and five, and his current UI out of combat, in combat, and with everything on -- in test mode, so to speak. Let's move into Alphabot's email.

First off, let me say that I have been developing this UI for a while now and have slowly been making it more streamlined. My motto, if you will, when developing this was to keep it simple while maintaining effectiveness and keep it (mostly) symmetrical. Below I have listed all the addons I use grouped by what's required, what's not, and what is irrelevant to the UI.

Required
Bartender4
- Typical action bars.
ForteXorcist
- Used to track cooldowns as well as track debuffs/DoTs on the target.
Masque
- Used to skin Bartender/SUF.
Masque Skinner: ShadowedUF
- Allows you to use Masque with SUF.
MikScrollingBattleText
- Displays incoming/outgoing damage and healing in an arc around the player.
Prat
- Removes chat frame, sets font, fades text, and lots of other nifty things.
Quartz
- Tracking your spells, your pet's spells and your target's spells.
SexyMap
- Restyles the minimap and allows you to hide certain aspects of the minimap (clock, zone, etc).
Shadowed Unit Frames (SUF)
- Replaces Blizzard's default player/party/raid UI.
Tidy Plates
- Replaces Blizzard's nameplates and allows you to track your debuffs/DoTs just by looking at them.
TipTac
- I use this to move all the tooltips to where I point my cursor.

Not required
eAlign
- Great for aligning elements (only supports 16:9).
OmniCC
- Displays cooldowns numerically on the action bars.
OPie
- Used here for mounts, Pet-related skills (feed, revive, etc), and Hunter Aspects.
RangeDisplay
- Only use this because my main is my hunter and is useful in my opinion.
Skada Damage Meter
- Just used for damage, recount works as well though I prefer Skada.
MoveAnything
- Although not heavily used here (only slightly moved quest tracker), it's a great little addon.
WeakAuras
- Not seen here but it allows me to track events and when major cooldowns are ready.

One thing I appreciate from Alphabot's email is the inclusion of the secret little addons, the ones that don't immediately show themselves off when you're looking at the finished article. Two of my favorites, ignoring weakauras although I adore it, are eAlign, and MoveAnything. For those of us who have a fixation on symmetry, like Alphabot, and indeed me, eAlign is just fantasitc. It provides both a grid to align your UI elements to, and positioning information to enable you to make informed choices about your positioning. Can't tell if that frame is a few pixels off because you've been staring at it for five hours? eAlign is here to help. And MoveAnything does exactly what it says on the tin -- with a few exceptions, it allows you to move anything, any part of your UI, anything at all. It also works with other addons, and even UI replacements in many, though not all, cases. If you're using the standard UI and just want a bit of a reshuffle, MoveAnything might be all you need.

Good things

I really like the out-of-combat look of this UI. There's something excellent about exploring the world with a clear window, looking out and enjoying what's around you, but then having your UI reappear like a sentient HUD when you're making with the stabby. Alphabot's UI appears, from the retrospective, to have long focused on such ideas, and does a great job of fading out the un-necessary. I would love, in my minimal way, to see the quest tracker fade out to, say, a 50% alpha, but then, of course, you would have a far harder time reading what you were supposed to be up to!

The symmetry is also very pleasing, although I do have some minor nits to pick with the frames -- which I'll get to later -- the overall shape of the UI, the bars, the player, pet, target and target-of-target frames is excellent. Alphabot has clearly put a lot of effort into the positioning of other elements around the main combat-focused cluster, too, with the space being neatly filled with debuff bars, debuff icons, player, target and pet castbars, and a linear cooldown timer, courtesy of ForteXorcist, all of which tie together nicely in a central column. Alphabot has also done pretty sterling work in one of my main pet peeve areas -- fonts! He's got great font consistency, with one or two exceptions, but I'll let him off, since he also includes a YouTube link to how to set up consistent fonts across a UI! Good work, Alphabot.

Not-so-good things

I do have a few minor quibbles, but they're minor indeed. Firstly, the frame spacing in the party and raid frames. This is best viewed on the shot which shows everything off, but you can see there are large gaps between each group member's frame, which has the net effect of unnecessarily increasing the area they occupy on the screen. Particularly as a DPS, and Alphabot's characters seem, from the images, to be mostly DPS, it doesn't seem necessary to have the frames taking up such a prominent and large zone. Perhaps the 5-man frames are different, given that there's more onus on everyone to make sure nobody else is dying, but they still seem very large on the screen. In my opinion, in fact, all the unit frames could be scaled down a little, much as I like the general look of the UI.

There is also a little repetition in the debuffs, with them appearing as timed bars, in the middle, icons on the frames, and on the nameplates. This is not necessarily a bad thing, given that there's usually situations where several displays are useful, but Alphabot advertises this as a minimal UI, so I'm looking at it from that perspective.

As time goes by

In a change from our usual schedule, I thought it might be fun to take a look back through Alphabot's generously provided UI history. As a reminder, we had UI shots one, two, three, four and five, and his current UI out of combat, in combat, and with everything on. Which one is your favorite? And, of course why? I actually really like the very first one's main layout, I assume the target would have filled the space mirroring the player frame. But I am not a fan of the round buttons, nor of various other elements! What's your take on the history of Alphabot's UI?

And please do email your UIs to olivia@wowinsider.com! Interested in getting the most out of your user interface? Come back once a week for more examples of reader UIs. For more details on individual addons, check out Addon Spotlight, or visit Addons 101 for help getting started. Tags: add-on, add-on-configuration, add-on-examples, add-on-guide, addon-configuration, addon-examples, addon-guide, addons, featured, guide, ui, ui-configuration, ui-guide, user-interface, user-interface-guide, wow-add-on, wow-add-on-guide, wow-add-ons, wow-addon-guide, wow-addons, wow-guide, wow-ui-configuration

Filed under: Reader UI of the Week

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Reader UI of the Week: And now for something completely different

While this column is still relatively new to me, one of the things I'm really enjoying about it is how it's opening my eyes to different people's UI designs. I can honestly say that this week's UI was, for me, a design that I have never seen before, nor even considered. Long-time readers, and fans of varying UIs, will doubtless have encountered this sort of design before, but for me, as the title suggests, it's something completely different! Bonus points awarded to anyone who gets the reference in the title.

Bull has sent over a good number of pictures, so as ever, I'm going to link them all here for your delectation. There's one for his out-of-combat solo UI, another for his hunter clearing some pests, his destruction warlock, a demonstration of Baggins, a throwaway Alliance character so we can see how the UI works for both factions, and finally, the original UI with a legend that tallies with Rusthoof's email. Whew! Quite a list there, Bull, thanks very much!

Let's dive straight in with Bull's detailed email. Apologies, but for space constraints, I've had to wield the editing stick a little.

I like a well organized UI. I also have what might be described as an obscene number of alts. The UI has to be able to support them all without separate configurations.

This is one of those "viewport UIs", but I disagree with the notion that they some how get in the way of playing. They keep most UI out of my way. The big bar on the bottom is no more blocking my view than is the dashboard of my car

I use kgPanels with custom scripting extensively for the UI element backgrounds. For the most part I'm using built-in game art. The two exceptions are the logo for my guild that you can see behind the chat frames and the swirly line art in the center of the top and bottom panels. The horde logo behind the clock and behind the various divisions of the bottom panel is dynamic. As you can see in one of the included screen shots, when I log in with an alliance character, the lion image is used instead.

One of the screen shots has numerals to identify UI elements:

1) Chat Frame - I use Prat to customize the heck out of the chat frame. I use kgPanels to replace the tabs with some fancy scripting. I put my guild's logo in the background just for fun.
2) Player frame - indicators like combat, pvp and rest icons are shown on the square portrait. Health and power bars are vertical on the right. Mousing over the frame shows some additional data that I didn't want cluttering up the UI all the time. To the right of the player frame, above the action buttons, I show the percent remaining HP and Power. This latter data also shows during combat.
3) Pet frame
4) Weak Auras - I design my own Weak Auras displays and put them here. In the screen shots you can see my druid's Eclipse status, my hunter pet's Frenzy stacks, my warlock's Demonic Fury.
5) Action bars - I have two Bartender4 profiles. One for pet classes and one for everyone else. The pet class profile differs in that when I do not have a pet active, the pet bar is replaced with a bar containing my pet summon buttons. I still need to be able to play the game on my laptop without any mods at all. This means I only use the standard action bars keybinds.
6) Target frame - it also has mouseover and in-combat data that mirrors the player frame.
7) Target of target
8) Focus target
9) Skada
10) More Action Bars - things I don't necessarily need in combat. These bars are faded out by default.
11) Analog Clock - I was looking for something to put in the top left to visually balance out the minimap. (I'm big on symmetry) I found the AnalogClock on wowinterface.com, but it was slightly out of date and broken. I got out my LUA wrenches and screwdrivers and got it working again, then slapped some kgPanels behind it to make it look pretty.
12) Docking Station - lots of heads-up info here.
13) Minimap - styled by Chinchilla!
15) Watcher - Who Framed Watcher Wabbit gives me more control over the built-in quest watcher.

Notable Points

Do check out the class colored styling of all the kgPanels UI elements here. When I first looked at Bull's screenshots, my thought was that it resembled the walnut dashboard you see in some older cars, echoed by Bull's statement about the dashboard being similar to a viewport UI. However, when it changes colors to reflect the different classes using the UI, that image quickly disappears. In a way, the wooden look is quite appropriate for a Tauren Druid!

On a similar note, it's really a big plus point for Bull's UI that it works so seamlessly across different characters. While hardly world-changing, given that many UIs -- particularly full replacement UIs -- do, but for a UI that Bull has largely created from the ground up, it's quite an achievement. Sure, there are custom weakauras in there for characters who need them, but it's still largely a carbon copy from one character to the next, and it appears from Bull's screenshot of the token Alliance character that the color changing and such is completely automated. I must admit, though, I'm still not sold on viewports...

Good Things

You all know how picky I am about fonts, so it's fantastic that Bull is the same, many brownie points awarded for font consistency! Looking over Bull's UI, the only spot which I can find where there's inconsistency in the font is on his lower level warlock's XP gain. That seems to still be using the default font, but it's highly possible that Bull has fixed that already. The nameplates on his hunter screenshot are too small for me to be 100% sure whether the font is consistent or not, so we'll give Bull the benefit of the doubt there.

I also really like the symmetry of this UI, something Bull mentions in his email. The clock, while I would prefer it without the numbers, (which, I've just noticed, are also in a different font) does bring a nice balance to the UI. I appreciate the auto-hide elements too, I'm forever grizzling about un-necessary elements being on show during combat, and yet again Bull is on the same page. He's auto-hiding a lot of information, such as character names, target names, health and mana expressed as percentages, and more. All the information is available on mouseover, as are his bars and the rest of the things he chooses to conceal.

Not-so-good things

This may be me being unfair, and letting my own gameplay cloud my judgement, but it seems like the player health, and to a lesser extent mana bars, are too low in this UI's priority order. They're very small and thin, and don't really stand out a great deal, and the same rather applies for the target health and mana bars. There are also percentages visible when in combat, but to me, a numerical expression can sometimes be less useful than a big bar glaring at you. There's more space dedicated to the damage meters than to the health and mana or energy information! This, of course, could simply be indicative of different priorities, as all the screengrabs Bull has sent show him playing a DPS rather than a tank or a healer.

What's more, the player castbar is tiny, and I'm assuming the target castbar is a mirror image of it, with Bull's symmetrical leanings. The target castbar, particularly, would be far too small for me. I like big, in-your-face information that helps me to interrupt. Of course, the nameplates could well provide a duplicate target castbar.

What do you think of Bull's UI? And if you want to submit your own, please do send an email to olivia@wowinsider.com with screenshots, detailing what addons you use, what you're happy with and what you're unhappy with or what remains unfinished in your UI.
Interested in getting the most out of your user interface? Come back once a week for more examples of reader UIs. For more details on individual addons, check out Addon Spotlight, or visit Addons 101 for help getting started. Filed under: Reader UI of the Week

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My first WoW reader is by the Daily Blink

I'll let you in on a secret: I have a daughter. She's nearly 6 months old and it's only by raw, sheer, unadulterated force of will that every one of my posts on WoW Insider isn't "Look how squishy she is!"

I read to her frequently. And while I'm not necessarily proud of it, River's enjoyed more than a few of the collected works of Chris Metzen. And while the crew at Blizzard spin a heck of a tale, relatively few Azerothian quests really make for great baby reading material.

The crack team at The Daily Blink have rescued me with When I Level Up. With a wry and wonderful sense of humor, When I Level Up is the WoW-themed reader I've been craving. Praising virtue, good spirits, and the inexorable spirit of a child growing up in Azeroth, When I Level Up is truly a treat for the whole family. To The Daily Blink, I tip my hat -- and my Squishy -- to you.

Make sure to go read When I Level Up at The Daily Blink. Tags: child, river, the-daily-blink, when-i-level-up

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Reader UI of the Week: Mostly minimal

This week's UI comes from Buzzardbait of Winterhoof, US. He's been keeping an eye on us at Reader UI of the Week, and felt like he should send his version of a good-looking UI over. As you'll see from his email, Buzzardbait is a fan of minimalism, and doesn't like to see a cluttered UI on his screen. Each to their own, I, personally, agree with Buzzardbait to an extent -- as you might recall from my own UI, I like to keep things clean, but I also like to have everything on show that I feel I need.

It's a fine balance between minimalism and utility, and Buzzardbait uses some clever ideas to lean heavily towards the minimal end of the scale. He makes great use of some macros, as we can see from reading his email. He also sent me a link to a full album of his UI screenshots, which you can see here. I've also grabbed a few relevant ones for you, in case the gallery doesn't work, so here's a solo screenshot, here's a 5-man screenshot, and here's the one in the header.

Hit the break for Buzzardbait's email.

I'm a long-time fan, and also a long-time hater of cluttered UIs.

I'm more of the minimalist and clean UI type. I prefer that if I don't need something that I shouldn't see it. I have a ton of transparencies and addons to remove or relocate things that get in the way of unrelated tasks, etc.
I'm also a professional programmer, at least that's what it says on my fancy business cards that I never use :P

There are button bars on the left and the right of the main bar that are invisible until you mouse-over them. You can vaguely see them in some pics. Every button slot, from button 1-8 at least, is a macro that includes a minimum of 3 spells all accessible with modifier keys. This is mainly for use with my Razer Nostromo or it's now dead predecessor the Belkin n52te. My Druid, which has been my new main for a while, includes a single button macro that can turn me to bear form, cat form, swift flight form, sad manatee, ground mount, travel form and a flying mount (for extra pizzaz when traveling long distances). It checks to see if you're in water, in combat or if the zone is flyable or not in order to auto-select certain forms.

I'm not sure that I like the Pitbull unit frames. I just recently added them for the animated avatar effect. I was using X-Perl before for a cleaner look, but was just wanting to splash the UI with something different.

I'm also trying out the mini-map at the bottom-right corner using SexyMap. Still trying to decide if I like it or not. If I keep it I need to use another addon to re-locate the tooltips to another spot... Hey! How about the top-right! Rather ridiculous to be honest. I think I'll be moving it back. I also use TidyPlates but I haven't bothered checking for a newer version since the 5.1 patch hit today, so the enemy frames don't look as streamlined / clean as they should.

I've wanted to send in screen-shots for a long time now, as every time I see someone's UI with stuff all over the place it drives me absolutely nuts. You know the saying though, one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

Thanks!
- Buzzardbait (Winterhoof)

Full Addon list:
Addon Manager (outdated)
Altoholic
Bartender4
FastQuest
GatherMate2
Gladius
Healbot
Mapster
Pitbull4
SexyMap
Skada
Tidy Plates
TomTom
DBM

Notable Points

Despite being the addon girl, and having heard of it before, I didn't realize that Mapster created that map, the one without the border and the unnecessary squared off area that blocks out bits of your screen that you don't need to keep blocked out. I love it! I can see it having some minor issues when you're moving from zone to zone, but I'm assuming that there is a simple way to toggle it from the minimal overlay back to the normal view.

In other notable points, I do see from Buzzardbait's email that his UI is clearly a work in progress, and that there are a few elements that he's still moving around. He sent me this email a little while back, so it's possible that his UI has undergone several changes since the iteration he sent over. I think UIs are almost always a work in progress, UI modification is very addictive, the guy who got me into it will often spend a few hours tucked away in a secluded area trying to alter a few pixels here and there! We must, therefore, be a little forgiving in our assessment of his minimal elements.

Good things

I definitely like the hidden buttons, from recent submissions that we've covered readers may have gleaned that having empty or superfluous action buttons on show is a pet peeve of mine, so I'm pleased to note that Buzzardbait isn't falling into this trap. He's actually gone a long old way in the opposite direction, taking great pains to keep his action buttons as minimal as possible. And as part of that, he's made good use of some macros, allowing him to keep the buttons on display as light as he can. As noted in his email, all the visible buttons on the solo shot have macros on them, containing three spells accessed via modifier macros. Any reader of my PvP columns will know that I'm a real fan of modifier macros!

Oh, and did I mention I'm a huge fan of that map? It's such a good look! Other than that, I definitely like the overall feel of this UI, especially solo, it's really good to see one that has not got things hanging out all over the screen. It really, apart from anything else, allows a clear view of the world, which, in a game as pretty as WoW, is definitely a good thing.

Not-so-good things

I have to say, I'm not loving the Pitbull unit frames. Buzzardbait mentions these in his email, and like he says, I'm not sure about them. They seem too busy and too cluttered for the rest of his UI, not to mention far too large in the 5-man shot. Buzzardbait doesn't mention whether he does much raiding, but they would be extremely intrusive in 10-man. Pitbull does allow for considerable customization of the unitframes, so perhaps Buzzardbait has now developed a superior solution to these frames.

I'm also slightly surprised by the look of healbot. I was a little critical of another healbot last week, saying that I didn't think the user had had a chance to look at it, and perhaps the same is true of Buzzardbait's healbot this week. Healbot is very customizable indeed, although perhaps less so than grid or vuhdo, and definitely doesn't have to look like its default layout forever. Do have a dig around in the "bars" section of the menu, where you can change the whole look of the addon. But perhaps Buzzardbait likes the default look, while I immediately switch it to class colors and my preferred bar texture. Everyone's different!

And the weekly "NOOOO" goes to the lack of icons attributed to the macros on the standard visible action bar. It's all well and good only having 8 buttons visible, laudable in fact, but do make sure they're pretty! I have been known to waste a good ten minutes finding the perfect icon for my macros, especially ones that do different spells based on conditions, so seeing that ugly old question mark so many times hurts my soul! However, in one of the screenshots Buzzardbait sent over, the icons are changed, so maybe he's pre-empted my sadness about the icons!

What are your thoughts on the UI? And if you want to send your own in, do send an email over to olivia@wowinsider.com, let me know what addons you're using, what you like, what you don't like, and what you're working on!
Interested in getting the most out of your user interface? Come back once a week for more examples of reader UIs. For more details on individual addons, check out Addon Spotlight, or visit Addons 101 for help getting started. Tags: add-on, add-on-configuration, add-on-examples, add-on-guide, addon-configuration, addon-examples, addon-guide, addons, featured, guide, ui, ui-configuration, ui-guide, user-interface, user-interface-guide, wow-add-on, wow-add-on-guide, wow-add-ons, wow-addon-guide, wow-addons, wow-guide, wow-ui-configuration

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Reader UI of the Week: Crazy Castbars

I really wanted to make a special, seasonal, Winter Veil UI, but alas I ran out of time. Next year, maybe! If you made a special Winter Veil or other seasonal UI to pretty up your screen over the festive period, do send it in, I'd love to see it!
Instead, we've got Palanorma's paladin UI, which he sent in in response to last week's column. He said in his email that it reminded him of his, and I can definitely see why. Palanorma included two screenshots, one not casting, and one casting.

If you want to send in your UI, drop an email to olivia@wowinsider.com. Do let me know what addons you're using, and if you have any thoughts on elements of your UI that you're particularly proud of or unhappy with, do put that information in, too.

Also, someone suggested a while back that we should run a UI surgery, where you send in a UI that you're unhappy with, and the community and I have a bash at fixing it for you. If that sounds like fun, or like it might help you, send in your UI!

The email accompanying Palanorma's UI reads as follows:

My UI is that same throw everything down at the bottom type, which I am able to use because I play on a 42 inch TV. A major design of my UI is the big vertical cast bars. I love them and never miss an interrupt (player left, target right). Another is the button pad on the right side which is all key bound to my razor naga which has 12 keypad style buttons (It helps me remember where each button is bound). The left bunch of buttons are other random key binds to help keep some symmetry. I also use weak auras to display holy power, and to make the middle of my UI flashy when I pop avenging wrath. Many hours have gone into this UI.

Addons:
Weak Auras
sunnart viewports
tinydps
sexymap
razer naga addon (like bartender)
chatter
gnosis
shadowed unit frames
healbot
masque

Notable Points

I can definitely see why last week's UI inspired Palanorma to send in his, there are a lot of very similar elements, and it's good to see the versatility between different players' ways of implementing the features offered by different UI addons. Both UIs use Sunn Viewport art to similar effect, but the styles are fairly different, with Palanorma creating more of a defined border with the UI elements placed over the viewport art, while Tweedlebop let the viewport art do all the talking.

You'll likely have spotted how I called this column Crazy Castbars, and they really, really are. I don't think I've ever seen a UI with vertical castbars before, and I've left this extremely notable point up here rather than putting it under either good things or not-so-good things, because I'm really not sure what category it falls under! The idea of vertical castbars is interesting, but I'm not sure if it works better than the traditional left-to-right design. I've never seen a game that has castbars which run vertically as part of the standard design, but I believe it's an option available in UI modifications such as IceHUD, and indeed, in Palanorma's UI.

I'm trying to think of reasons why they might not be the default choice, and the only one I can even remotely quantify is that they may somehow mean that you're less likely to notice when an enemy cast starts. In the IceHUD setup, as we've seen in a couple of previous UIs, the vertical castbars appear right in the center of your screen, under your nose, so you're not likely to miss them, but it strikes me that a cast starting right at the bottom of the screen could be further out of your focus area, and therefore not grab your attention as well as a more central castbar could. However, Palanorma does say he never misses a cast. What do you think? Would you consider some crazy castbars like these?

Good Things

Right, now that we've got the castbars out of the way, let's focus on the rest of the UI. It's really, really pretty, for starters. Some minor quibbles aside, I think it's a great-looking UI. I like the consistent theme of the bold black borders a lot, if you're going to do something, be thorough, and Palanorma's definitely done that! I particularly like the weakauras models for the holy power, they're very gold and glowy and paladin-y! The texture used on the action buttons is nice too, the whole thing looks very shiny. And I really appreciate Palanorma's attention to the symmetry of the UI, in the picture, having the 5 holy power and the buffs on the opposite side, all balanmces out very nicely indeed. I also really like the bright long-term buffs and the more faded temporary ones. There's an addon I thought Palanorma might benefit from, which is the buff version of Masque: BlizzBuffsFacade. It should, as he uses Masque already, permit him to skin the buffs to match the action buttons, and tie in even better with the rest of his UI.

Speaking of action buttons, I think the central group works really well, housing his key abilities in a focused area works very nicely. And, with the above discussion of the crazy castbars, and notiwthstanding the below conversation about fonts, the positioning of the enemy castbar text is, in my opinion at least, brilliant -- it's right where you'd be looking to check cooldowns on key abilities and the like, so it's in your focus. And, on reflection, the appearance of this cast text above your action bars would alert you to an enemy cast the second it started, even if the castbar begins from the bottom of the screen! Very innovative and original.

Not-so-good things

On the not-so-good things list today, we've got a few minor niggles, nothing serious though, just bits and bobs here and there. One such niggle is the font inconsistency. I know it's really tricky to deal with, though, hence why it's only registering as a minor niggle at this point rather than a more major one. The Blizzard default fonts are hard to modify compared to the ones in addons, and, of course, you want to pick one of the other, prettier fonts for your addons. Not the Blizzard own-brand one! There used to be addons like Fonter which dealt with these problems for you, but I haven't yet found one that's up to date, so the only other option is to use addons for all visible UI elements. In this case, a questing addon and some alteration within Chatter would do most of the work.

My only other quibble with this UI, really, is whether the sunnart is really needed. On last week's UI with Tweedlebop, the sunnart viewport was a really central part of the display. He'd gone to great pains to show it off, while this week, Palanorma has rather hidden it away. I'm wondering if it's necessary to have the art behind the panels at all, given that they almost completely hide it anyhow. What are your thoughts?

And the weekly "NOOOOO" goes to healbot. Not the use of healbot, I used to be quite the fan myself, I just don't really think it quite fits with the rest of this very attractive UI!

Healbot is pretty customizable, visually at least, and I wonder if Palanorma just hasn't quite got round to playing with it yet, it's very similar to how mine was before I'd really dug into the customization. The self and option panels could perhaps go, and those icons are properly tiny! Although, it should be remembered that Palanorma's playing on a huge, huge, huge screen, so maybe it's not actually an issue.

Interested in getting the most out of your user interface? Come back once a week for more examples of reader UIs. For more details on individual addons, check out Addon Spotlight, or visit Addons 101 for help getting started. Tags: add-on, add-on-configuration, add-on-examples, add-on-guide, addon-configuration, addon-examples, addon-guide, addons, chatter, featured, gnosis, guide, healbot, masque, sunnart, ui, ui-configuration, ui-guide, user-interface, user-interface-guide, weakauras, wow-add-on, wow-add-on-guide, wow-add-ons, wow-addon-guide, wow-addons, wow-guide, wow-ui-configuration

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