The Review:

I love WoW Interface. I prefer it to Curse. When they released their updater yesterday, I was ecstatic. WoW Interface has a lot of the little eccentric, niche addons that Curse doesn’t have (e.g. NeonChat, RaidCooldownsDisplay, OPie, etc) so I often have to run the Curse updater and then visit the WoW Interface website. I update addons daily. What makes this process bearable is that I’m also subscribed to WoW Interface’s RSS feed that posts updates as they come out in my Google Reader. Through the day at work, I just make note of which addons have been updated and I go home and update them. A pretty painless process overall, really.

I was kind of hoping the Minion would make my life even easier but that hope was deflated rather quickly. I downloaded the beta and started it up (cheers for Java so that it works on all major OS’s). It picked up most of the addons, said I had to update a whole bunch of them though. Eh, so I hit the update all button, didn’t really check since it was 5 minutes to raid time, and quit.

I log in and find that a bunch of things were not as they were supposed to be. There was a unit frame in the middle of my screen with my name and a white box (white for priest, I assume) that represented my health. There was an additional panel after my raid panel, where the tab was named “GA” (the tab was also broken) with stuff for a guild alliance. I kept getting text in the chat log that told me to rebuff fort, spirit, etc. Things that I didn’t have before were popping up randomly. What. The. F*ck.

Logged out and checked the addons folder and found a bunch of addons that I never downloaded, would never want to use, but magically appeared: Guild Alliance, Annoying Self Buff Reminder (annoying is an understatement), Healbot, and some other random things, in addition to screwing up my entire UI font scheme because it updated SharedMedia or something.

Good one Minion, you just “updated” a bunch of crap that was never in my directory to start with.

I then ran the Curse updater to see what could be updated that wasn’t on WoW Interface – bunch of addons that were updated by the Minion had the triangle error icon next to it. Poop! It probably didn’t mean anything but I just re-installed them anyway (OCD okay?). It seems to know which addons were updated from its own database.

Minion’s search function works just fine. I looked up Damn Achievement Spam (damn that achievement spam!) and hit install. I scanned through my addons list to make sure it was downloaded but I didn’t see it when I got to the D’s so I re-installed it. Oh, wait, newly added addons are added to the bottom of the entire list. Oh, how did I not see that? Because that’s soooooooo intuitive.

The Conclusion:

Minion does its job but it’s not very smart. You’re probably going to want to update each addon separately after you check to see if it’s actually going to install the correct addon instead of some random mumbo jumbo that it thinks you’re using. Don’t trust the “Update All” button.

There are a couple of design flaws, as witnessed by the search and install function. I don’t think listing newly installed addons at the bottom of the window is really the most intuitive. The frame for the list of addons needs to be bigger. I maximized the program window but the frame was still a little small. I couldn’t find a way to drag/resize the frame.

I would say keep the Curse updater as your go-to-program and use the Minion to fill in the missing gaps by hand. At least it saves you time from unzipping the addon and moving it into the Addons folder after you download from the website.

TL;DR

Minion needs work. Stick with the Curse updater and use the Minion to update addons that Curse doesn’t have but make sure to update each one separately to check Minion’s picking up the correct addon.

Es kann schnell passieren, sehr schnell. “Ach komm, nur die zwei Level noch!” und schwupps, da ist man 70 – und möchte “noch schnell” dies und das und jenes und solches erledigen.

Nicht zuletzt das Interface ist umzugestalten, denn mit Level 70 ist ja alles anders. Sollte es zumindest? Schritt für Schritt, wenn mich WoW verschont, werde ich euch meine persönlichen Favoriten vorstellen – Addons, ohne die ich nicht mehr spiele.

So all my add-ons broke.

And i have to admit that i’ve been very lazy about updating them but as a penance for my lackadaisical attitude i bring you some post 2.4 add-on update resources =)

Wow Interface actually has a great page of updated mods and add-ons. If i find more i’ll post them but until then here you go.

OK so i started updating and here’s my list of updated mods. I still need a damage meter and my Dottimer.

My Clock

Bagnon

Atlas loots

Orgri’lazy (trying for the first time)

Omen

OmniCC

Dynamic rep bar

Auctioneer

Gatherer

Deadly Boss Mods -check for further updates

CTmod-check for further updates