Bluefish

So far so good for the Invisible UI. In lieu of an addon to cause my chat frames to actually fade out, and because I have yet to find a cooldown tracker I'm satisfied with (wtb CooldownTimer2 working, maybe it's been fixed by now?) I used CT_Viewport to unrender a couple inches of the bottom of my screen and shoved all my clutter down there. Wow -- takes some getting used to, but I feel like much more of my screen is visible and the faux-widescreen look is kinda fun. Look ma, I'm on TV!

I remember seeing an addon from a thread a couple months back that drew a rectangle around your chat frames -- very simple but aesthetically pleasing. Now I can't find it. It would help visually compartmentalize the unrendered space.

Already solved:

• Buff management (sort of). Addons like Elkano BuffBar show us everything with no regard for what's important. DebuffFilter allows us to choose what self-buffs and enemy debuffs we really need to highlight and bring them to the foreground. For some classes, there's a lot of these, and we don't need to know the duration of all of them. This is where PowerAuras comes in -- it's excellent for displaying things like HoTs and DPS procs that we want to know about, but don't need specific durations for. Still no way to filter completely unimportant buffs -- can't be that hard to squelch certain icons based on name, can it?
• Minimizing chatframe clutter. Prat linked by Malan is phenomenal -- pretty intensive and unfriendly setup (lots of slash commands), but an extremely powerful and flexible tool for modding chat windows. Provides scrollwheel bars, font size editing, slash command aliases, truncating channel names, squelching join/leave channel messages client-side, etc.
• Nuking unused bars and editing the ones we like. Bartender lets you display only what you want and customize the general shape, position, and style of your bars without bogging down your system (<3 Ace) or having to struggle with setup.
• Fading HUD. Drathal's HUD (and others I'm sure) has options to alter transparency based on combat flags and health/mana levels.
• SlashGM allows us to nuke the row of menu buttons since with the exception of Help Requests, everything else is keybound.
• Inventory management. ArkInventory is my preferred add-on here, but any non-bag sorting method addon will do fine -- anything that lets us never care about the bags frame again.
  Useless error removal. "You are mounted," "There is nothing to attack," etc.
• ErrorMonster has worked well so far.

The wish list:

• Chat frames that fade out when inactive, not just disappearing text on a transparent background.
• Unit frames that only display individuals that are below 100% health or mana, or in combat.
• World PvP objective notification frame that only shows objectives that aren't solidly capped for my side. (In Nagrand for instance, my Halaa with 15/15 guards is not relevant information, anything else is)
• A reputation bar that fades after a certain amount of time without a rep bump.
• A way to make KTM -- or any addon-built frame I want? wishful thinking? -- not display out of combat. Already has a setting to only display in parties so that's fine.
• A way to never display certain buffs in the buff frame -- I know I'm mounted, I don't need to see an icon for it.

So, in case you haven't noticed...TBC is really pretty! The night I got my flying mount I flapped around with my interface turned off just looking at everything. I thought to myself, "Wow, my UI really gets in the way of seeing all the neat stuff around here." Since then I've been pondering the idea of putting an interface together with a theme of "if it isn't doing anything, make it go away." The default position of every UI element is HI, I'M HERE even if it's not actually contributing anything. I want a UI that does the opposite: Things only appear if they're important.

After a couple hours of browsing Curse I'm ready to throw my hands up and admit: I need help! The features I want just are simple, but just aren't advertised in a meaningful way. How do I run a search for unit frames that disappear out of combat? Stuff like that. I'm hoping for a few suggestions and pointers, and to share what I've found so far.

I'll keep this updated as I find (or am pointed towards) more solutions.

 

◊ Malan

Prat can do that, although that's an awful lot of addon to do just that task.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Liryn

Doesn't MoveAnything qualify for that? I'm not sure how the innards of the mod work, but I've successfully nuked some frames with it...

 

• Tarnop

Buffalo allows you to customise your buff display and is ACE-tastic

 

◊ Shalas

Doable with Grid, although it'd probably require enough customization to be usable as your only unit frames that it'd be easier just to add the feature to more normal unit frames

MoveAnything or Visor can handle this (although saying Visor does something is a bit of a cop-out as it can do pretty much anything).

Setting the fade time to something very short (5-10 seconds?) and a mousewheel chat scroll addon could handle this decently.

Doable with Visor, but I don't think there's anything specific to do that.

 

• Zellyn

One mod you might try and see if it works for you (though I think you'd still need a mod like Buffalo to specifically hide certain buffs) is PowerAuras. It's a platform for creating specific images and texture appear on the screen whenever specific buffs/debuffs are active on you. By doing this you could eliminate the need for any kind of buff-tracker by simply having certain textures appear when one buff or another is active, and these can be configured to only appear in combat.

 

wikberget

I think it is possible with Perfectraid as well.

 

Bluefish

Downloaded Buffalo, had to install Abacus because it wasn't packaged with it. Got it working now, but I don't see any option (nor does the Wiki page suggest one) to disable certain buffs by name and have others still show. :(

 

Bluefish

PerfectRaid seems too limited -- it only displays debuffs by type instead of showing the actual debuff. I also can't see mana, numbers for hitpoint/mana pools, etc.

 

Fingolfin

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...fo.php?id=5332

Easy readability plus it fades out after a certain time.

 

Nephthys

I'm a big believer in minimalist interfaces. One thing I used to do with Discord was make action bars that were invisible until the cursor was over them. This post inspired me to write an addon for WoW 2.0 that does just that: MouseOver. It just adjusts the transparency -- there were issues with the stealth bar not changing back to the right page when I actually hid the bars.

 

Plea

If you can customize it to show the ones on cooldown without mouseover too, that would be even lovely.

 

◊ Binkenstein

Also try Morganti's Buffbar.

<Sporks> quote of the day: "it's like the vague leading the blind directing the clueless guiding the stupid around here"
Yahtzee In short, no. In long, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

 

Bluefish

Unless I missed it, Morganti's also doesn't have the functionality I'm looking for, which is squelching buffs I don't want to see. I don't need another Elkano clone or replacement for the default buff frame -- if it's important, it's on DebuffFilter or PowerAuras, if it's not it's in a tiny corner of my screen. I just want that corner to be cleaner.

 

grzesieq

I'd love to see a screenshot of how it's looking so far.

 

• bekayoh

This mod might fix your buff problem: Satrina's buff Frames 2

I just got it today, you have a lot of control over how and where buffs are displayed and if you come across a buff or debuff you don't want to see just shift+ left click it and tell it not to be displayed. Hope that helps.

Edit: I would also love to see a screenshot of how your UI is coming along. An invisable UI has been a long time goal of mine.

 

grzesieq

I've been trying to make a minimalistic UI for quite a long time. Here's what I used to use:


And here's what I'm working on now:


Bartender3 has some nice possibilities to show bars on mouseover only, but it doesn't hide the cooldown thing, so every time I get the gcd, there's a whole lot of switly things on the screen. Hopefully this will get fixed soon.

 

Nephthys

That's a bug in the default UI with the cooldown frames not using their parent's alpha value. It's slated to be fixed in 2.1.0.

 

Bloodtear

- sRaidFrames (www.wowace.com/files)
Use "Inverted Health Bars" and "Transparent Background" and you will only see bars for the units with less then 100% HP