What keeps you using FuBar?

funkydude · 03/20/08, 5:32 PM

I've recently made an AddOn called StatBlocks based on the Ace3 framework, although very similar to AddOns such as CML and SLCore, it's aim is provide an alternative for FuBar with plan to add support for icon textures after 2.4 and blocks for AddOn configuration via a right click or etc.

It has come pretty far since I first released it (quite a short time) and I'm currently looking to find out what the main things are that keep people using FuBar and why. Just write up an explanation and why you like such and such feature, what it does for you etc.

You can find screenshots and feature sets on that link, you can also find the ability to change text and text color in the Memory block, which will be expanded to all blocks in the future. A full list of blocks is on files.wowace.com and WAU with the prefix StatBlocks_*

Thank you in advance for any input <3

◊ Penguin · 03/20/08, 5:44 PM

I use Fubar primarily for quick access to addon menus/options. It's far less cluttering than cramming them onto the minimap frame, and it's nice to have the ability to access them individually via menu, rather than rolled up into the Rock Waterfall thing. I hate addons that are slash-command only, we left that behind in DOS. The secondary reason for it being installed is for the concise display of information tidbits that are normally scattered about. The info displays that I have running are time, ping, bagspace, ammo, durability and xp/hr when leveling.

Margot · 03/20/08, 5:55 PM

Things I use FuBar for:

BattlegroundFu - current BG queue timers
CraftTimersFu - display shows x/y, where x is current number of cooldowns (transmute, etc.) available, and y is total; mouseover says how long on each character
InnboundFu - shows Hearthstone location and cooldown
LootTypeFu - current loot settings
MoneyFu - display is just current gold; mouseover shows money on each character as well as total and changes
RestFu - mouseover shows where each character was logged out, and how much rested they have
ScaleFu - UI scale adjustment
VolumeFu - Volume adjustment

A lot of it is alt management, really.

Suesse · 03/20/08, 5:55 PM

You've already hit on the ones I inspect most commonly: clock & zone text. I also have a BigWigs menu so I can quickly activate a boss module which doesn't automatically start correctly every time. Finally, TopScoreFu records top scores, which I don't really check very often using FuBar, but it does require FuBar.

One mod which doesn't currently use Fubar but might work in your system is "TimeToDie" or something like that. It predicts how long before the boss will die. You could possibly also off-load some of the trash repop or boss enrage timers to this stat block thing?

aleyro · 03/20/08, 6:14 PM

Originally Posted by funkydude

I've recently made an AddOn called StatBlocks based on the Ace3 framework, although very similar to AddOns such as CML and SLCore, it's aim is provide an alternative for FuBar with plan to add support for icon textures after 2.4 and blocks for AddOn configuration via a right click or etc.

It has come pretty far since I first released it (quite a short time) and I'm currently looking to find out what the main things are that keep people using FuBar and why. Just write up an explanation and why you like such and such feature, what it does for you etc.

You can find screenshots and feature sets on that link, you can also find the ability to change text and text color in the Memory block, which will be expanded to all blocks in the future. A full list of blocks is on files.wowace.com and WAU with the prefix StatBlocks_*

Thank you in advance for any input <3

To be honest, i don't really care about fubar, but i do care about all of the fu-plugins available. FuBar itself is just a means (in my case, horizontal, auto-hidden, tooltip enabled bars) to an end (accountant, nihao, arena/honor mods, timers, etc).

I think that fubar is effective as a super simple "container", that other mod developers can easily plug into. it also serves as a rudimentary layout manager- you create bars, you add widgets, widgets are aligned left/right/center, the bar itself takes care of the rest (if your from a software development background, i'm sure the larger topics of containers and layout managers may resonate with you...). StatsBlocks looks like it also serves as an effective container, and it looks like it offers some valuable services (common configuration UI, etc)- but I think that there are some other services that could be valuable- for example, I would love a context sensitive layout manager that 1.) let me configure a collection of associated widgets for different general activities (farming, pvp, raid, chillin in IF, instances, etc) and then 2.) automatically detected which activity i was doing, and 3.) switched layouts based on that.

example:

I just logged on to wow. my UI shows me a bunch of "social" mods- friends lists, recent guild changes, arena team updates, etc. Maybe it also shows some auction stuff and profession cooldown timers. My UI knows that I don't need to see grid, or my hud, or even my unit bars right now, so it doesn't show them to me.

i open the LFG tool and say that I want to run heroic shattered halls. after a few minutes, the LFG tool finds a matching group for me, and i accept the invitation. my whole UI changes to my "instances" profile automatically, and a waypoint for shattered halls is added to my map.

I start flying down, but we loose our healer by the time I get there.

the 4 remaining group members decide to take it out on the lowbie hordes in Hellfire World PVP. Once i engage in PVP in the world PVP area, my layout switches to my PVP layout (just like when i enter a BG). my PVP UI includes things like enemy cast timers, honor grind monitors, kill counters, emphasized tools for buff/debuff management, etc.

Configuring this is easy. there are a series of "rules" associated with each context, which i can customize/configure through a UI (e.g., kill X of the same mob in Y mins and you switch to farming mode, list of "PVP" zones, etc). further, individual "widgets" can easily align themselves to these contexts, making it even easier to figure out which widgets to include where.

Gearknight · 03/20/08, 6:14 PM

FuBar provides two things, when you break it down:

Informational displays
Settings popups for addons, which I divide into 2 categories: short-term and long-term.

Long term settings are things like Prat and Pitbull, which won't be changed very often, and won't remain permanently on a FuBar. I use a FuBar containing all of these when i'm doing significant UI modifications, then remove it.

Short-term settings are things like Loggerhead or oRA2. You access them to change settings frequently.

Informational displays are things like Ammo, Bags, Mail.

In all of the above capacities, the thing that's best about FuBar is that it easily replaces cluttered and ugly circular minimap buttons with orderly rows with a uniform and somewhat customizable appearance.

Your goal with StatBlocks seems to be to recreate both of these major functionalities, but with greater customizability in appearance than FuBar, by starting from the case of individual floating elements, and requiring users to move them into uniform rows, if desired. FuBar can also make individual floating elements, although most people don't use it to do so, and the default setting is for a small number of large bars. I personally have 4 permanent FuBars on my interface, none of which is locked to a screen edge or spans the entire width of the screen. The number of items on my least populated FuBar is 1 and on my most populated FuBar is about 10.

If you want to entice a large number of users away from FuBar, you're going to need to offer a great deal in the area of customizability to overcome both the loss of simplicity as well as the inertial resistance to changing from one addon to a very similar one.

• nj00s · 03/20/08, 10:06 PM

uGuild and uFriends, basically. Give me something like that and I'd happily change to any addon, because honestly it's the only reason I have FuBar installed.

grzesieq · 03/21/08, 6:50 AM

I use FuBar mostly for FriendsFu and GuildFu -- easy way to check who's online (and who's in raid) and fast way to start a chat, especially when people have some silly characters in their names.

Also, when I tried not to use FuBar, I found that I kept forgetting to repair, so that would be another good use.

Other than that, it's just a place to put all the mod configuration buttons, to keep a clean minimap.

Borsch · 03/21/08, 7:42 AM

Using Fubar cause of the Auto-hide function.
Quick access to many things but not disturbing me during raids.

finduluin · 03/21/08, 8:06 AM

Originally Posted by Borsch

Using Fubar cause of the Auto-hide function.
Quick access to many things but not disturbing me during raids.

All said in 2 sentences.

Nothing shown on Minimap, only icons on Fubar and Fubar auto-hiding itself.

MoneyFu doesn't have known equivalent. Others are mainly for quick informative access.

As you can read, GuildFu, FriendsFu and MoneyFu are the three laub functions many people are used to have in.

Laknor · 03/21/08, 8:36 AM

same as Borsch for me, one of my 2 fubar's is hidden and has all the shortcuts to addon menus + crafting menus. the other ones are the common ones, durability, clock, zone. One addon in particular is something i use a lot which is farmerfu, shows a little list of items you want to keep tracking (bank, bag, total numbers). I prefer it over keeping my bags open all the time when farming.

Sinzar · 03/21/08, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by funkydude

... I'm currently looking to find out what the main things are that keep people using FuBar and why. Just write up an explanation and why you like such and such feature, what it does for you etc...

I installed and gave Statblocks a try, but quickly went back to FuBar. A few of the reasons:

Statblocks doesn't adjust your frames for you so that I can create a "bar" along the top of the screen for my information (it doesn't move the target,player,map,buffs etc frames down a bit to make room along top).

Statblocks are..... to put it bluntly, a bit ugly. FuBar has pretty little icons, a bar to line things up on with it's own large selection of textures, lots of color coding, etc. Your thread said that icons and different colors are coming in future updates, so maybe this will change, but immediately my first impression upon logging in was ugh, what are these white squares. A default color scheme (not just boring white) / icons etc on first install would go a long way to retaining "casual" users. Most people don't care if they are saving a bit of UI memory, they care how pretty it looks.

Statblocks don't seem to have any features except displaying some information. While that may be the idea of the mod, to be very simplistic information display, I think if you are trying to convert FuBar users, you need to add in all the features of FuBar, such as detailed tooltips on mouseover (I don't think I could ever handle losing GuildFu tooltip), things like auto-repair option for the durability plugin, etc etc.

Finally, and the single biggest concern, is will this be supported by all "Ace" mods as the new "standard" for configurations? Will all existing mods like Omen, BigWigs, sRaidFrames, oRa2, Violation, etc etc etc be changed over to StatBlocks for their option menus? Or if they won't be converted, will there at least be some kind of "StatBlocks Plugin" mod to make all the FuBar plugins compatible? Because no matter how superior StatBlocks eventually becomes compared to FuBar, if the majority of popular mods like Omen still use FuBar for it's settings, most people are not going to lose that.

Anyway, I don't mean to be harsh about your new mod idea, but you asked why people still use FuBar, and at least for myself, all of the above

I look forward to seeing future updates on StatBlocks!

dyree · 03/21/08, 1:03 PM

My fubar is basically a holder for all my minimap icons that I can't otherwise hide (much hate for addons that shove themselves onto my fubar but don't have "Hide without standby" enabled).

Of the things I actually want to see, they fall into 3 categories:
1) Stuff I want to have quick access to the menu or click functionality (Bugsack, ClosetGnome, BigWigs, GroupFu)
2) Stuff to toggle other windows (Sanity, tcg's Tradskills, RecountFu, nQuestLog)
3) Stuff that gives me additional information in the tooltip (Historian, MoneyFu, PerformanceFu, my own arena/honor points tracking addon)

Most of my "information only" type displays are using SLCore right now. As soon as you add in text justification, I'll likely switch over to StatBlocks.

Noraj · 03/21/08, 6:22 PM

Although I do use a small (~500px wide) secondary FuBar to display the time, my monetary information, a mail notifier, and to give access to ClosetGnome, the main use for me isn't information display. Instead, I use it to consolidate all of the various minimap icons that Ace mods use. This could just as easily be accomplished using MinimapButtonBag or MiniMapButtonFrame, but both of those treat the icons from GatherMate as minimap icons, and hide them from me.

StatBlocks is a great idea and a godsend for some different UI ideas I've had, but it won't replace FuBar for me as it only covers half of the FuBar functionality that I use.

wyldbill · 03/21/08, 6:35 PM

Most of my reasons are touched on already but to emphasize, a really big reason for me is choice of display. Some plugins control addons that I occasionally need to dig into. Those don't need to display text with their plugin, and I have reduced them to their icon alone. I then clustered them together (similar to the windows "systray") on one side of my two-stack of fubar panels. Items that I glance at a bit more often are then grouped into a center cluster, and another that is a left cluster.

Perhaps a screenshot is best to illustrate: http://jafomatic.net/img/screenshots/wb2008Jui.jpg

Another point, I have been seeing more and more statblocks_* plugins added to wowace showing up in my RSS ticker and I am always tempted to make that kind of a switch but I believe I'd still "require" fubar for the plugins that I currently have set and grouped as "icon only"

Apologies for the ugly interface, I was playing with some new fonts in sharedmedia during some downtime and didn't finish "prettying up" before the raid. Worse, I reloaded UI in combat and the autobar got itself stuck in fully-extended mode which was ... really irritating. The important part is the fubar at the top.

Something to add:

If you could make a statblock that will house the same plugin icons (which are also valid minimap buttons?) that would remove my reluctance.

◊ Oggie · 03/21/08, 10:56 PM

I would go insane without DurabilityFu, mailFu, MoneyFu and the hooks for oRA2 and Omen. There's at least a couple others I'm sure, but I can't remember them offhand.

This could be a very interesting mod.

ishellbulleti · 03/22/08, 5:49 AM

Funkydude i hope you make this addon great as you've mode other addons great : )

I use fubar to show information in a small hidden manner. I wanna know what durability i'm at? mouseover the top portion of my screen. WHat time is it? top portion again. wanna change my outfit to SR gear? right click the closetgnome icon and click my SR set icon. bascially instead of cluttering up my screen with huge icons or annoying text, i have small icons, sometimes text, on my fubar bar which auto hides itself so i don't even have to see it unless i want to.

Everyone else that I know using fubar uses it for basically the same thing, or at the very least to keep their minimap clean of huge circular icons.

JuhnorX · 03/22/08, 9:04 AM

GuildFU, MoneyFU, DuraFU, and the quick link to all my addons without having to go through Deuce Commander or any other menus or commands.

I especially like the way everything can be moved and personalised, i run the top bar with mouseover fade and i love it.

GuildFU i find especially useful as a Guild Master and Raid Leader, I would say this is the most important and most used part of it. Everything else is a bonus.

Fulnir · 03/22/08, 8:03 PM

A picture says more than a thousand words:

oRA2 plugin - For easy access. Now that I think about it I hardly use it anymore, will probably remove this.

ClosetGnome plugin - Shows which set I currently have on. Wouldn't live without it.

MicroMenuFu - I primarily use this for the LFG tool and Help since I don't have any keybindings for those.

TrackerFu - Hides the minimap icon and displays what I'm currently tracking. A wonderful tool, since it rids me of the ugly minimapbutton + it's faster to use.

PerformanceFu - Shows at a glance how my system is doing.

DurabilityFu - Self explanatory.

BagFu - Self explanatory.

MoneyFu - I love that I can see my total amount of between characters.

Recount plugin - Allows me to show/hide recount with a simple click + have fast access to options.

DeuceCommander - Probably the icon I click the most on my screen, it's invaluable to me for organizing mods, probably the ace of spades of Fubar for me.

Bugsack - You know this.

Postal plugin - removes the minimapbutton for mail and lets me see auction info, etc.

The best thing about Fubar is that almost every Ace addon can plug into it. It's not that I love fubar, I love that everything supports it. I haven't read up on the development on Statblocks, but the reason why I didn't go with them was that traditional addons don't plug into them like they do to Fubar.
I'm sure most of the features I've described are accessible in Statblocks, such as performance, bag, money, time, etc.
90% time I install an ace addon it plugs into fubar automatically which makes it easy for me to find the GUI and set it up. I understand Rock and Ace3 addons have their own GUI, but there's alot of core addons out there which support fubar (dewdrop) only to my knowledge, I could be mistaken, but until Statblocks can give me the same features fubar gives me I won't convert.

badMonkey · 03/23/08, 6:57 PM

Hi funkydude,
I really love your StatBlocks addon! I switched over to it from FuBar recentliy and I think I'll stay with it. The only thing i really (really really!) miss is the addon-configuration via FuBar (because I change my UI almost every week so I recognize bugs or some other stuff in combat - and trying to type a slash command while smashing my anytimer-key is suboptimal ^^)! Would love to see something like that implemented in StatBlocks!

aadric · 03/24/08, 2:23 PM

The reason I use FuBar is because if I turn it off I get 30+ icons surrounding my minimap and I don't want to deal with fixing that.

Also, right-clicking in an used area of FuBar is how I bring up the "Generic Ace Options Pane" (don't know what the term du jour is this month).

Taidaisher · 03/24/08, 2:51 PM

I actually don't use FuBar. I have tried to several times, because I haven't wanted to play with battleground/friend/guild fu, but I'm not crazy about it. I use Titan Panel, which does have the autohide feature for the bars. It displays my location, DM, durability, itemrack icon & current gear set, bag slots, loot settings, etc. For my minimap I use chinchilla. Right clicking on the chinchilla minimap, opens up an addon manager configuration table which allows me to hide the minimap icons for the rest of my addons (omen, bartender, cycircled, perl, cartographer, chinchilla, proximo, and some others I can't think of right now).

I have been looking to get away from titan panel though, so I will definately look into statblocks.

Led ++ · 03/25/08, 7:21 AM

I used it mostly because of lazyness, eg. seeing my gold, durability easy acces to addon configurations however I dumped FuBar a long time ago. Now I just press B to see bags and gold. ctrl - C for char screen for durability and most of my addosn can be setup through /rock anyway.

Memory useage and things like that are easy trackable wih LynStats.