Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend, because it's time to get serious -- interface serious. That's like the most intense kind of serious, next to super-serious. This week's reader submission needs some super-serious help, tips, and tricks to help make things more manageable for its user, Shamonkey. And while I'm not the most forgiving person when it comes to novelty pun names, I am forgiving when someone is in need. Shamonkey, we've got your back.

Shamonkey's UI is a little out of sorts -- not unusable by any stretch of the imagination, but things could use a bit of a tidying up, don't you think? There's no shame in asking for some help, and laptop UIs are always a hot topic amongst emailers and commenters. Take a look, read my advice, and maybe post some of your own in the comments.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: Cleaning up a distressed laptop UI

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: Cleaning up a distressed laptop UI originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Have you ever been in the situation where something that you had utterly convinced yourself was out of reach was in fact right in front of you the whole time? Sometimes people just don't know that they've got the right thing working for them when it's already working. I suspect that many people feel this way about their user interfaces and the addons that they choose to use during their play experience. One of the reasons people are in such positions is because they don't have clear goals set when they begin to tinker with their user interfaces.

Addon newcomer Curokk doesn't know how good he has it already. With a few clear-cut goals, Curokk's interface is a solid piece of simplicity and function. Primarily a 5-man dungeon type of player with Raid Finder aspirations, Curokk forged his setup in the boredom and hopelessness that is the Time Lost Proto-Drake hunt. It features nice borders, a simple layout, and a whole bunch of screen real estate left open to view all the pretty action for his shaman to experience. Let's see what Curokk has to say about his UI, whether we can help out some ... and if he actually got the Time Lost Proto-Drake during all that UI building.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: Clear goals make better interfaces

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: Clear goals make better interfaces originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

We've talked about the standard all-characters user interface before, but with my own experience moving to level up an alt over the course of the next few months bookended by raiding on my main, I wanted to talk again about building one UI for all your characters. Let's get the myths out of the way first.

The first myth about building a UI for all of your characters that I want to dispell is the fact that you can't actually do this. That's totally wrong. One UI that you build and maintain can be worked into a setup that works for all characters, no matter what spec or class. Sure, you may have to move something here or there, but if you relegate those movements to addons with simple move commands, you'll cut down on your own confusion pretty quickly.

Reader Ymer sent in his user interface that aims to be used across his bevy of alts, ready to roll for any of the four characters who decide to log in on that given day. Let's take a look at his setup, see what we can glean, and then make some general comments about using your interface for multiple characters.

Continue reading Sharing the same UI across all characters

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Sharing the same UI across all characters originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Welcome to another installment of Reader UI of the Week, WoW Insider's showcase for your awesome interfaces, customizations, and works of UI art. Sometimes we even learn a thing or two about how to assemble a working user interface from the charred remains of one poor soul's cooking disaster. Anyway, this week's user interface surrounds a subject close to home for me -- tanking. Warrior tanking, to be precise.

Arothand's user interface boasts a clean layout that lets the addons themselves do the contrasting rather than a black background or border system, with an emphasis on keybinds and prioritizing buttons based on size. Let's jump right in and see if we can offer some tips and tricks, as well as praise, for this solid tanking setup.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: A tanking UI with a flair for scale

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: A tanking UI with a flair for scale originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

The move from laptop to desktop can be a startling change of pace for many players. Usually players go from a desktop to the more mobile laptop, considering that laptops are so powerful these days that they're not being thought of anymore as second-rate gaming machines. Jumping from laptop to desktop would be a pretty jarring experience.

Reader Blackoccamy has made this jarring move and has sent in her UI to show off a simple and lived-in DPS user interface. After going from a healer role to a DPS role, the requirements for a user interface drop a bit, since you don't need to have as much concern for your fellow raiders. Many pieces of DPS UIs don't need as much functionality as their healing equivalents, so you might find yourself with some extra space left over.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: Going from laptop to desktop

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: Going from laptop to desktop originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

With many players getting ready to return to the World of Warcraft when the newest patch Hour of Twilight hits the deck, I thought it might be good to look at some more bare-bones approaches to user interfaces since setting up a whole new UI, especially after being gone for a while, can be daunting. A good friend of mine recently started playing his death knight again after a long time being absent and asked me what addons he needed. As my smile quickly turned into a serious, broad line and my lips lost all sense of joviality, I realized that one of my best friends hasn't been reading my columns.

Tsk.

Anyway, today we're taking a look at Aeide's user interface, built from the ground up with love and care. Aeide is a PVE player exclusively, with a penchant for pushing everything to the bottom of the screen and keeping the middle and top as clear and clean as possible, much to my own heart. With some simple kgPanel work and some minimal planning, you too can space out your addons and give them clear little borders to live within. Any UI that promotes addon segregation is one step ahead in my book.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: Mark addon territory with Aeide's setup

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: Mark addon territory with Aeide's setup originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Welcome back to Reader UI of the Week, where your awesome UI creations go out for the world to see and learn from. I must stress again that this is a learning experience, people. Learn. Adapt. Thrive. Evolve into user interface greatness. Our submission this week is one of those examples of coolness and tidiness that many people could get some cool ideas from.

Sigkill is a hunter with a distraction-free UI. His email subject started to pick at my mind: distraction-free. Are there really distractions out there that are part of a user interface? Why would a game distract you from, say, playing the game? Are there addons that are distracting you during serious raid play or just flashing when things shouldn't be flashing? Am I being too nitpicky? Well, I might have figured it out, and with your help, I think we'll be on the road to distraction-free UIs for all of us.

Continue reading Reader UI of the Week: A distraction-free hunter UI

Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

Reader UI of the Week: A distraction-free hunter UI originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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