Patch 2.2
2.2 is now out, the first major patch in a long time. I'm a bit disappointed that there was no new content to go with it, but it seems that the turnaround between this patch and 2.3 will be quite quick. I'm really looking forward to ZA. I'm also looking forward to the Brewfest stuff hitting the retail realms, as well as VOIP. My guild will continue to use vent, but it'll provide a good bit of entertainment for me on pickup runs :)
Anyway, the arrival of a new WoW patch means that addons also have to be updated. The biggest single change to the interface is alteration of all tooltip functions to be easier to have managed updates. This is good news for me, since it means I don't have to write my own system for throttling tooltip updates (a decent source of performance loss). It also means a whole bunch of addons were broken by the change, but those issues will and are being resolved by updates.
Addon Updates
Bagnon has had a few significant issues related to 2.2. A lot of users are reporting tooltip errors, most of which are the result of them using tooltip modifying addons that have not been updated for the patch. A few errors were actually the fault of Bagnon, but I've squashed those issues now.
Bongos had an issue with the experience bar brought about by me rewriting it. I should have caught it in the testing process, but failed to do so. A good bit of users are also reacting negatively to the merging of the keyring and bag bars, since people seem to use the bag bar, but not the keyring. My plan right now is to simply make it possible to hide the keyring. Another issue has come up too: PickupAction was made secure, so its no longer possible to pick up actions in combat in the current implementation of Bongos ActionBar. I'm mulling over a major rewrite of the ActionBar portion to fix this.
Users are now discovering an issue in OmniCC: cooldowns are becoming hidden after opening the map. I plan on fixing this when I do a bit of a rewrite. I want to do two things in the rewrite: make the code less hacky, and also implement a configuration GUI.
SellFish has undergone a significant rewrite. I'm now using a sell value library called ItemPrice as the database back end. Its smaller and a bit faster than my old method of a big ass compressed string, and also means that I no longer have to worry about doing my own parsing of the armory :) I don't expect to make any major changes in the near future.
Sage and Ludwig have had no real issues since the patch. I'm not planning any major updates.
Combuctor will be worked on after I update OmniCC and Bongos. I've not done much work on it since I wrote this post, as I took a little bit of a break from addon coding.
The Great Forking
Ace2 was the first real embedded framework created for WoW, and is beginning to show its age. Ace2 is big, crufty, and even a bit buggy. So, developers have started the process of building a successor. Three major things have come out of this.
The first thing is LibStub. LibStub basically allows us to create embeddable libraries with minimal overhead. This is a significant thing for me, because it means I can finally think about using some of those nice libraries that are around. As mentioned earlier, SellFish was converted to use ItemPrice. This was the reason. I encourage all library authors to think about reworking their libraries to use LibStub.
The second thing is Rock, ckknight's new framework. Rock, from my standpoint is effectively a rewritten Ace2. I've not really done any benchmarks, but I know it has a smaller initial memory footprint than Ace2 by a significant amount. All of ck's addons have been converted to use Rock. I think ck was a bit too quick to get Rock out to users, since there were many bugs to quash. I'm sure it'll be much more stable over time, but a lot of users were put into the 'Rock sucks' mode because of the quick release.
The third thing is Ace3, a new framework being developed by a handful of developers in the Ace community. Ace3 is a completely different beast from Ace2. Each part is being designed to work independently to also be quite small. I'm watching this one closely, though it will not be out for a while.
Why are there multiple frameworks around? Because developers have different ideas :) Overall, it won't be a bad thing that multiple frameworks exist, as I expect most libraries to be converted to LibStub.
One major change being implemented by 2.3 is the possibility of cleanly faking action buttons. This is important because it means its possible for us to break the 120 button limit. It also means that action button settings will need to be saved on your computer, which will make it a bit more difficult to transfer between computers.
Maul (TrinityBars) and Cogwheel (CogsBar) are both going to be working on implementations, and I think I heard that Maul is going to convert trinity to the system. I'm thinking about working on it myself, but more as a supplement to Bongos ActionBar, and not a replacement. It really depends on how well such a system would perform.
