Today’s post is an interview with esteemed addon author Tekkub! Enjoy!
So tell us a bit about yourself outside of the game first. What do you do?
I’m your standard lethargic, antisocial lazy bear-like person. I strive for 10-14 hours of sleep a day and am certainly not above hibernating if the weather is right.
I work from home, doing some web programming in Ruby on Rails, and tech support for GitHub.com. As odd as it sounds, I actually attribute my wow addons to getting me both jobs. The Ruby gig is through a friend, and going in the only real programming experience I had to show for it was my addons. Being that the source is not compiled and they’re posted online, I was able to point my "boss" at it and he could see my coding habits, even if he didn’t understand the language. The github job I kinda lucked into. They posted a job to their blog looking for a support person and I was able to say "hey, look at the metric asstonne of repos I’ve got. It proves I know how to use git!" They actually turned me down for the job at first, but then came back to me a month later and offered.
Socially, I’m a hermit. I hate bars and clubs. Get me around a group larger than say, 4 people, and I’ll just go all Silent Bob. It happens with everyone, even my own family.
How did you get started gaming?
Of course, back when I was a kid I had the standard Nintendo stuff, an NES, Game Boy, SNES. It kinda stopped there, I think that was about the time my parents got computers, which of course I found more interesting. I never liked computer gaming much beyond games like Myst and Riven, which of course have little replay value after you’ve solved them. In high school we had a little semi-nerdy group (you could call us the computer club, but we never officially were a club) that would hang out in the lab playing Marathon on the networked macs, and the first Warcraft. Well, I didn’t really play, I watched others play and made physics mods for Marathon. I was never able to develop the "twitch" for FPS or the strategy for Warcraft. Honestly I was much more interested in the stories than the blowing people up.
As for MMOs, it’s really a stupid story. One day, my roomie (from the old computer not-a-club) came home with FFXI. He told me I should try it, him and a friend from work were. Meh. A few hours later he’d installed and patched and was logging in. I went over to see what it was like. First thing that runs past him is this big sexy furry beast with a tail. "That’s one of the playable races"… an hour later me and my boyfriend are installing copies of our own. It’s been downhill from there.
How did you get started and involved with addons?
Cosmos, isn’t that where everyone started? I don’t think we were even out of the public beta before we were installing addons. Within a few months I was tweaking or fixing up broken addons, and not long after that I was writing my own. I honestly spend more time writing addons than playing. I’ve been in the game since beta and in that time I’ve only seen ZG, AQ20, MC, and the first 2 bosses of BWL at 60, Kara up to Shade at 70, and Naxx/OS at 80. I’m hoping to see more of 80’s endgame before the next expansion… and I’d love to find a guild that did old raids just for fun, but I never can.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
Uhm, I honestly don’t have anything *big* in the works. I just pushed out horde Northrend guides for TourGuide a week or so ago. I’ve been tinkering with a minimalistic boss timer addon (yes, even simpler than BigWigs)… but I find myself not *caring* about timers. I know I know, I’m a bad raid healer, screw you all. I’ve been considering redesigning oUF_Grid a bit more, but the motivation just hasn’t hit me hard.
One other thing I’ve been tossing around for a long LONG time is an online "wish list" site. Something where I give a list of say, every rare or better lv80 healing item, break it up by "tier" (heroics, crafted/BoE, T1 10-mans, T1 25-mans, S5 PvP …), and then grouped up by source (I.E. instance or raid boss). The general idea being that you’d remove the items you don’t want and you’d be left with a nice list that says "you have 4 potential upgrades in Gun’drak, but only 1 in Nexus". Make it a lot easier to know where to focus for gearing up, especially outside of raids.
But then each time I start to work on it, lack of motivation rears it’s ugly head, and I end up lurking on the wowace and wowinterface forums instead.
Regarding your WoW endeavors, where are you at and what’re you up to? Do you have a high interest in raiding or PvP?
My boyfriend finally found a raiding guild that didn’t boot him within an hour (we’re kinda.. how you say… highly offensive… to EVERYONE). This has kinda re-interested him in playing, as he’s a total loot whore. We’ve done a few naxx-25s and an OS25 (no drakes) with them. I’m hoping I at least get to see all the first-tier bosses and maybe play a little into Ulduar with them. I could care less about the hard modes, as I said before, I’m generally more interested in the story.
As for PvP, I honestly hate it. I’ve never stepped foot in AB, EotS, or that new one (strand of the ancients I think?) I went in AV once to get my "Hallowed" title… which consisted of about 10 minutes of following the angry mob tossing out random heals. The weird irony? Every time I’ve gone to Wintergrasp I’ve had a ball. I certainly am not interested in farming honor or marks, but it’s fun to hit it up from time to time and, just like in AV, follow the herd randomly healing people. I’ve gotten a few pieces of gear for my spriest this way… which I’ve never used since I’m specced holy/disc…
What’s your current character and why did you pick that particular class and race combination?
I have a dorf priest and a dreanish pally at 80, and a dorf huntard at 74ish that I’m not at all motivated to level. The hunter was my first toon, the only one I had at 60 originally. The class doesn’t excite me, it never really has (I’m a healer at heart)… I only took it for the free bear. I would have rather made a tauren druid way back at the start, but my friends went ally, and that stuck. Next up was the priest (named Beardyhead ^^), because I wanted a healer in TBC due to the usual shortage of healers. I got him to 70 with a friend, only to find I could never really find a group. So, since my friend and I needed something to level, I rolled the pally to tank with. He’s now 80, specced prot/holy, and heals most of the time. Ah irony.
If I could do it all over again, a tauren druid named Bear would be all it’d take to make me happy. Seems that furriness is my biggest motivation doesn’t it? What does that say about me…
Where do you get your inspiration and ideas for addons from?
I see broken or inadequate things and I have this obsessive compulsive urge to fix them. Lots of my addons are little fixes or enhancements to the default UI. Sometimes I see an addon I don’t like (CTRA_BossMods) and I just have to make something better (BigWigs). Other times I see see something poorly written (a certain paid leveling guide) and I just have to do it better, and then release it for free to spite them (TourGuide). Other times it’s just random stupidity (Rawr) or simplifying someone else’s good idea. My favorites though are the ones where all I start with is a name, and I have to find something that fits the name. Sometimes I sit on a great name for months before I find the code that goes with it. On rare occasion I make the mistake of looking at the code in someone else’s addon, crying a little inside, and then OCD kicks in and I have to fix it. I seem to somehow avoid this these days, I don’t know how.
Say if I wanted to start developing an addon of my own. Where should I start? What are the general steps in the process from beginning to end?
There’s lots of great resources out there. If you at least have a decent grasp of programming concepts (variables, tables, functions, garbage collections, scope)… I think the best way to learn is to find a simple addon that does exactly what you want, and dissect it.
After you have a general understanding of lua and the wow API, churning out addons is pretty easy. At this point you need to train yourself to do a few things to avoid the common pitfalls of new authors. Don’t worry, it’s not hard. Find something you want to fix or an idea you want to implement. Come up with a general design in you head, a plan for how your code will do what it needs to do. Keep this simple, every one of my addons was "written" in my head before I ever sat down at the computer. Now, my memory is crap, so if it was too complicated to remember, it got scrapped. I think this is a good rule of thumb for designing, it keeps your code small and to the point.
The second thing to teach yourself to do is to never lose focus on what your addon does. Don’t be afraid to turn down feature requests that don’t mesh with that vision. Also, don’t be afraid to start another addon if you LIKE the suggestion that doesn’t fit this addon. It’s trivially easy to start another addon, hell you can even use my own template: http://github.com/tekkub/addontemplate, it contains everything you should need, if you’re not using libraries. By remaining focused you avoid the most common mistake new developers make, the Borg Addon. What’s a borg addon? I’ll give you an example. Some years ago, a new author popped up with an addon that did something I’d never seen before, colored player names in chat using their corresponding raid color. It was a brilliant idea. But then this author started to see other things they wanted to fix and ideas they liked. Before long this simple chat addon was doing a dozen unrelated things… auto-repairing at vendors, skipping NPC gossip… Sure, each idea is great on it’s own, but they don’t belong in the same addon. The more random features you have the less likely users are to install, and the more things you have that can break. If a chat addon breaks because the threat API changed… that’s just bad. Keep things simple, small, and to the point. Do one thing and do it well. Don’t be afraid to amass a collection of lots of tiny addons.
The last thing you need to do is join the developer community. Get on IRC and the Ace and WoWI forums. Go read the tutorials and the lua manual. Pay attention to the "upcoming patch changes" thread on the official UI forum (but for your own sanity, don’t read the other posts there…) Never be afraid to ask for help, but be sure you put in a good effort to find an answer for yourself before you do. Other addon author love to help out, but they’re not at all interested in tutoring new developers. We all learned this stuff on our own, you will too, but we’ll help out if you get stuck.
What’s a typical patch day like? Absolute chaos and frustration from the programmer’s point of view?
I don’t even notice them. I read patch notes as they trickle out, and pay attention to the patch changes sticky on the UI forum. If I see some big change coming I’ll hop on the PTR and make sure my addons are updated. But in the end, things rarely ever break. I have addons dating back to classic wow that I’ve never had to update, aside from a TOC bump with TBC due to them disabling old addons completely.
Here’s a drama inducing question ;). What’s your favourite addon that you didn’t come up with? That you did come up with?
All of the ones I’m using ^^ Cladhaire, Kaelten, Haste and Tuller are among some of my favorite authors. If you weed out my own addons, you’ve got left… AddonLoader, BetterInbox, Butsu, Clique, DoubleWide, LightHeaded (can’t remember the last time I opened it, but it provides data to TourGuide), Ludwig, MSBT (Want a simpler replacement, but don’t want to write it myself), oGlow, OneBag/Bank, SellFish, Squire, TomTom and TradeTabs. I have 112 addons installed… ye gods I’ve written too many.
How can Blizzard make addon programing and writing easier for the modding community?
Honestly, I think they’ve done great as it is. I think my only complaint is how the game disables all "out of date" addons every patch. Sure, I can see it being helpful for the average user, but for power users and addon developers, please don’t undo our choice to load outdated addons. If it were me, I’d make the whole TOC version number a minor thing and instead simply offer to disable an addon when it throws an error.
One thing I would like, however, is credit for time spent coding. If I earned exp for time spent coding, I’d have an account full of 80’s by now. I know that’s in no way possible, so maybe a system where authors can register with Blizzard and users can donate game time to their favorite authors? That would be a great way for people to donate back to authors, instead of using PayPal you just pay a little extra with your monthly fee.
As an addon author, what are your thoughts regarding the debacle surrounding WoW Matrix several weeks ago?
The whole thing is one big mess. Wowmatrix wrote a wonderful little program, but the way they’ve "acquired" content for it (both past and present) is going to drive it into the ground if they don’t clean up their act. I think that many of the users out there don’t have an issue with WM using Curse or WoWInterface’s bandwidth because they see the two sites as "big companies". That’s fine, they have that right I guess… but I fear they’re not aware of the other sites that WM has been exploiting, or their actions after the two big sites blocked them. The first thing they did was turn their scrapers onto smaller sites to get their addons. At the same time, they put out these statements that they "respect their position in this matter", but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Take for example, what they did to Norganna’s Addons (the makers of Auctioneer and Gatherer). They added norgs to their scraper and in the matter of a few days, racked up a $450 bandwidth bill. Norgs changed their site around to block WM, and WM proceeded to bypass that block. Is that respect?
They also turned their scraper on my repo host, so I dug into the matter a little bit. At the time I looked (about a week after 3.1 was released), WM was scraping 34 sites other than Curse/WoWI for addons. I contacted as many of those sites as I could, informing them that they were being scraped and asking a few questions. I’ve posted the replies I’ve gotten back at http://tekkub.net/wm/ In the end, while some sites didn’t mind being scraped while others did, not a single response said that WM had contacted them asking permission. Some addons, like Carbonite and Titan, moved their hosting to Curse or WoWI specifically to avoid WM’s downloads.
Now, after all this hubbub, WM is offering their own hosting for addons, where they pay the bandwidth. But are they approaching authors, asking them to upload their addons? No. Instead they go after any addon with a free-distribution license (like the GPL, where they do not have to get permission to redistribute so long as they follow the rules of the license) and upload them on their own. Why don’t they try to win back the authors they’ve pissed off? Why don’t they provide forums and IRC channels and places to post documentation like Curse and WoWI have been doing for years? Is all they care about their ad money? That’s certainly the impression they’ve left me with.
What other questions have I not asked that you’d like to address?
If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why does he keep doing it?
Anything else you’d like to add?
I’m happy to see a UI-centric blog out here. That One Big WoW Blog That Shall Not Be Named seems to try to make everyone happy, and thus spreads themselves too thin. Like I said earlier, find one thing you want to do and don’t lose focus on that. I hope this site can do well and never loses it’s focus.
Thanks for the interview, Tekkub! Do check out Tekkub’s Emporium of Random Crap (where he stores addons and musings)!
Found a cool addon? Want to share a UI tip? In the mood to contribute a guest post? Have some ideas for future posts? Feel free to 
Interesting interview. Thank you Tekkub for all your addons, I use lots of them and as you say they really are to-the-point, efficient and well though out (and I like the funny names ^^). Keep up the good work !
Very good interveiw.
Loved the interview. I use tons of Tekkub’s addons, because they are minimalistic, never break, have small footprints, and do exactly what they’re supposed to do. More interviews like this, please! :)
This is great stuff! I love Tekkub’s addons, simply because modularity is actually understood in them, instead of trying to put everything into one big add on. One little addon, does what it says, perfect!
And the idea about an online wishlist? I’ve been wishing for that for a long time, the basic framework sounds great.
Excellent interview!
I’ve always loved Tekkub (StealYourCarbon being one of my all time favorites) and the Emporium since I discovered it about a year ago (I think).
Keep up the fantastic work!
Rawr!
I’m open to more questions here in comments if you guys have any.
Also, funny irony, patch notes dropped today and among many of the welcome casualties is my own teknicolor (which I actually referred to in the interview)… it’s now going to be part of the default UI! YATTA!
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
Oh and also, since doing the interview, I found oUF_Freebgrid and have taken a liking to it. I plan to give my own contributions to make it even betterer. http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info12264-oUF_Freebgrid.html
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
I think this is my favorite interview so far. Thanks Tekkub & Matt!
@ Tekkub I might end up trying that raid frame, that looks pretty slick.
Why wouldn’t you just use grid?
Sovereignty´s last blog ..UI Fail of the Week: Metzerott
Great interview, thank you so much for all your great addons, tekkub. It’s really nice to get to know a bit the person behind addons that I use for a very long time and have never failed me.
drug´s last blog ..Taking a Break
Because I don’t like grid? I love oUF, it’s so tiny, I can’t say the same for Grid.
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
thanks for the detailed interview. i deal with addons since the beginnings of WoW. i really enjoy reading nostockui. it’s an insider magazine for WoW addon development. keep up the good work!
tekbub – thank you for your contribution to the scene.
Lol Tekk, love your addons and your style. You sound like me at times in this interview too. All the best man, xox.
Oh btw HatTrick and VendorBait, by far the best wow addons ever.
Interesting interview. I do find one issue with this addon author’s view of WowMatrix. The attitude basically is that they want WM to be just like Curse and WoWI because of the fact that that Curse and WoWI have IRC channels, forums, and in general pretty things to make it so that people linger on the site more and bring in more ad revenue to Curse and WoWI. WM was created precisely because of user frustration with how Curse and WoWInterface worked (and how they still do work)
Here’s the thing: what WowMatrix did was what the users wanted. A lot of people don’t want to have to dig through a site to find what they need; they don’t feel a need for forums or for IRC channels to be in a community, etc. People don’t want to have to click through all the glitz and all the crap just to get what they want.
If an addon maker really didn’t want their addons to be shared via a GPL open source license, they can just not have the license. If you have the addon out there, it’s going to be shared one way or another; the only way for sure to not have other people leeching off is to not make the addon public.
The argument I make about WM not providing a place for the community, or even being part of the community for that matter, is not directed at the USER community. WM got things right with respect to the users… but they got it all oh so wrong with regards to the authors. Their product needs both sides to be successful, yet in the past they’ve done nothing but trample all over authors, and they’ve done nothing to mend fences with them since the “fallout”.
What I wanted to bring attention to was the things they did to authors after Curse/WoWI blocked them. If you love or hate Curse and WoWI, that’s all fine. But simple fact of the matter is that one one side they said things like they “respect” the sites that blocked them, and on the other side they turned their application on the smaller author’s sites, and took measures to circumvent the blocks those sites tried to implement.
Author WANT people to use their addons, if we did we *wouldn’t* share them (and trust me, there are some addons I won’t share because I don’t want to deal with the users)… and we understand that users want fast easy updating… but we want to work with the sites that have supported us in the past and gone above and beyond to provide us not only with free hosting, but places to find other authors and get help writing addons. WM has never done anything for us, they just swoop in take our work without asking, and tack on their own ads whist racking up bandwidth bills for the hosts and authors to pay. How would that make you feel if you were putting your stuff out there for free?
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
[...] matticus blog (even thou I follow him on twitter), but liserfak pointed me out that there was an interview with Tekkub (twitter), an addon creator of many useful crap so I was drained to read it. And Tekkub have an [...]
OMG – Make that WishList addon!! I was looking for exactly that last week and didn’t find anything. My lil warrior hit 80 *sniff* and I have all these lists of gear I need in spreadsheets etc and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to just have this in-game, so I could pull it up and say, “hey, I need xxxx from yyyy, anyone up for that?” instead of loading up a website or spreadsheet. I also wanted it to pop something up when that item dropped in a raid so I’d KNOW it was something i needed, instead of swapping out to the spreadsheet and figuring out if it was or not :)
Make it.. please please please. I’ll groom your bear for you :)
It’s actually not very likely that it’ll be an addon… instead it’d be a javascript-heavy web site (not unlike tekkub.net)… I’ve taken a great liking to jQuery, and it’s not fun maintaining big databases in addons… lua just isn’t designed for that sorta thing, which is fine.
I do hate those gear spreadsheet, they’re not very smart. What I want is essentially the same thing, with an extra layer that takes your current gear (from the armory) and removes the items that aren’t upgrades, leaving you with a wonderful list of where to go to get upgrades.
Maybe I could do it in a google docs spreadsheet instead? I know they’re beta-testing javascript macros… *ponder*
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
From what you have said in your interview, it would seem that some authors don’t mind that their work is being shared for free, just as long as it’s getting out there. If I were creating an item for the sole intention of getting it out there for profit, that’s one thing, but from what I’ve seen of addon authors, they say that’s not their intent, to make money off of their addons.
I mean, Curse/WoWI aren’t nearly as user friendly as they probably could be, seeming to focus more on the authors than on the users; and from what addon makers seem to repeatedly claim, WM focuses more on the users than on the addon authors. However, the more I think on it, the more I think that the whole Curse/WoWI/WM thing is just a symptom of the actual problem: it’s that the problem is fundamentally Users vs Addon Authors and has always been.
Think on it this way. You’ve said just earlier how you haven’t released some addons so that you wouldn’t “have to deal with the users”, and I’ve seen that similar sort of attitude in other addon authors. That just makes it feel like all the users are are just a bother to further whatever goals addon authors have in mind. As for how users view addon authors– a product is created, a user tries it, a user reasonably expects that the product just works; just like with any other product that is created and distributed.
Anybody that puts anything in the public domain should not expect any type of privacy for that product. If you didn’t want the addon to be shared openly; then you do not need to assign a public license to it; it’s that simple. If you don’t want to pay for hosting for the addon, it shouldn’t be hosted. All WM did was find other places that had open downloads for their users. It’s similar to the Boxee/Hulu situation: Hulu kept trying to block Boxee, and Boxee, in an attempt to better serve their users’ interest; attempted to circumvent Hulu’s protection schemes in order to access Hulu’s content. Hulu was seen as the bad guy for attempting to block Boxee in the first place; WM is like Boxee in this case. WM is getting addons out there to users in an easy to use format; they go by the idea that anytime something is up to be downloaded, it’s up for grabs to be downloaded. If you don’t want to pay for that or deal with the users, the open license shouldn’t be there.
The problem with the Hulu/Boxee comparison is that the advertising that pays for Hulu’s bandwidth was still seen on Boxee, that’s not the case with WM. And in the end, Hulu was working on their own desktop app, which is likely the reason they kept blocking Boxee. Depending on your opinion of Curse, you might believe their intention was the same, to push their own app. WoWI was just sorta “forced” into the situation because when Curse put up their block, WM would have just turned on WoWI instead… but WoWI blocked them too, so they turned against addon author’s sites.
You may have taken the “have to deal with users” comment out of context. The case in point is an auction addon for me. I’ve written it to do two very simple things… scan the min/max prices from the AH very quickly (not this slow fancy crap of keeping long histories and averages like Auctioneer does), and post items to the AH with a specific undercut of the lowest price currently available. It doesn’t save the prices at all, you can’t configure how it undercuts, and the fast scanning has some undesirable side effects (it basically kills your communications for about 5 minutes). I’ll never release this addon because it is designed specifically for what I need. Users would want config, they’d want average prices and history, and they’d want a nice clean interface for posting… they would want a replacement for Auctioneer. All that would, quite honestly, take me more time to implement than the existing addon did. Plus there’s the extra issue of people complaining about how it breaks chat for 5 minutes, which is actually Blizzard’s fault, not mine!
It’s not meant as an insult to users, it’s just a plain and simple fact that authors aren’t going to put out every bit of code they write for public use, because doing so entails a lot of extra support, sometimes more than one wants.
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
Excellent article. Straight talk and to the point.
Honestly, as you describe the addon, it seems like a decent addon designed for a specific type of person. I’d see the disclaimer that it doesn’t save auction history or min/max prices and while it might not be an addon I’d use because I like having that history saved, perhaps someone else who wants a speedy experience wouldn’t mind it. As for breaking the chat for 5 minutes– is that per character or just as a whole? Because I know that there are a lot of people who just make bank alts anyway specifically because they have a lot of things to sell who may or may not care about what’s in the chat window in the first place.
I’ll admit that there are some users out there who do just expect that everything comes out like magic; but I think there are a lot more users who just need a little explanation and then they can move on when it comes to the product. It just feels like there’s a huge disconnect when it comes to chat between addon authors and users, and we’re just made to feel like the idiot chumps. I would honestly think based on testimonials from addon authors who have been in contact with WM since patch 3.1 came out (which have been positive, from what I’ve seen), WM is trying to bridge that gap. Curse/WoWI? Not so much, especially Curse, from their recent “customer service”.
I think the chat-breaking is for 5 minutes across the board. The problem is that querying the entire AH at once also requests every seller’s name. Those name queries take some time, so any chat messages you receive in that time where you don’t have the name cached get delayed. You also see lots of “Unknown” units during this time. I haven’t tested for certain (when I’m at the AH I don’t expect to do anything for at least 5 minutes…) but I don’t think a relog or char swap fixes the issue. A full restart of the game probably does, however. Either way, I’ve never released the addon and never plan to because I just don’t feel it’s worth polishing up for users, mainly due to that issue. You can put all the big bold warnings on things you want, people still won’t read them… If users *really* want my auction addon, they can find it on GitHub, and I’ve got a ton of links to there floating around. Hell it should also show up on tekkub.net… I do share the code, I just have no plans of releasing an “official” build.
There is a disconnect… and there always will be. To be frank, at least from my end, it feels like users don’t read what authors say in their addon descriptions or the related threads. On every one of my addons I post links… where to contact me, where to submit bugs, where to find alpha builds, and where to find more of my addons. Very *very* few users ever follow the links, from what I can tell. They just open the comment section (if there is one, I have Curse’s turned off) and spout off there. Well that’s all fine and dandy for fast feedback… error reports and feature requests made that way just end up being forgotten. I like to have all my “todo” items in one place, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask users to post there if they want my attention. Yet they never do, and that only widens the gap between me and them…
The thing about WM and user community there is, they do absolutely nothing to bridge that gap either. Sure, they make it easier for users to get updates… but that’s all they do. If the user wants to send feedback, they have to click a link in WM (that didn’t used to exist, BTW…) that takes them where? Back to the site they would have downloaded from in the first place! WM hasn’t provided any tools to improve communications between users and devs, but they could (harvesting bugs in-game with an addon and sending those to authors… providing a direct feedback form that emailed comments directly to authors that registered with them… there’s tons of ways they could make things better. Maybe they’ll work towards this now that their primary content sources locked them out… who knows. But in the past they’ve only widened the user-dev gap by disconnecting users from the feedback mechanisms the sites provided, and pissing off developers.
I wonder if Curse still wants me to do customer service for them… *grin*
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
Maybe users do read the content that you provide, maybe they don’t; but that’s an extension of an average customer personality. With anybody providing a product, you’re going to have a vast majority of people who don’t really care about the product beyond getting it, using it, and moving on, and then you have the people at extremes who either go out of their way to badmouth or whatever said product providing person/company or who go out of their way to praise said product providng person/company. That’s basic customer service no matter what industry you’re in; it just seems that addon authors are letting it get to them more compared to people in other areas.
There’s a lot that WM could probably do, and maybe it’d sound better coming from an addon author than from a user; why not actually ask them if they’d be willing to do something to hypothetically do something, and see what the response is? Again, from what I’ve been hearing, addon authors now talking to WM are having positive experiences. Just because something happened in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s happening now. The beefs that users have with Curse/WoWI are based on things that those providers are doing *now*, the beefs that addon authors have with WM seem mostly based on past incidents that may not have a bearing today.
Trolling….
WOW, Not sure why your pressing so hard to have her/him change their mind about WM.
If I was an Addon author and WM had rubbed me wrong for so long, I would not be inclined to “forgive and forget” either. WM had lots of time (and complains) to correct their behavior, that chose not to do so until they had no choice. If WM really does “care” now, then they need to continue to do all the right things and as time passes, people will forget (some will not, but….).
You are correct, some will not — like me, for instance. WM burned that bridge when they failed to remove my addon when they were contacted. They removed it from the list of available addons but it was still available within their application. At that moment, they went on my “these people are scum and as such will forever be treated as scum” list.
Q, you are more than welcome to submit my suggestions to them, hell you can even claim they’re your own… but like HonorGoG, I’ve just been burned too many times by them in the past. If they can make amends with the author community as a whole, more power to them, but I’m not interested in directly helping them do that. “The ball is in their court” so to speak.
My comments in the interview and these replies were directly motivated by the actions the took against me and my employer after Curse and WoWI blocked them. Mind you, I’m not speaking officially on behalf of GitHub, I just feel that they acted against both of us by never asking permission. GitHub probably doesn’t care about that bandwidth use, but I do.
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
The thing is that again, it all goes back to the fact that it really isn’t necessarily Curse/WoWI vs. WM, it’s at its core users vs addon authors. What good is it going to be for WM to actually make changes if you all are just going to cling to what you “know” about WM? You say that the ball is in their court and all that, but honestly, if you’re just going to have the same old opinions about WM, and by extension, users, then why should the users care about you?
Maybe I have a different sort of thought process than a lot of people, I’ll admit that. I tend to give people and companies chances to redeem themselves when they say they’re going to make changes, even if I’ve been burned in the past. If that line of thinking extending to more people makes me a troll, then I suppose it shall be.
I’ll have the “same old opinions” about WM when I see them change their tactics. Since the block all I’ve seen from them is first turning their scraper on addon author’s sites, then grabbing GPL-ish addons that they can host without seeking permission. If they “say” that they’re improving that’s one thing… what they do is another. They said that they “respected” the decision Curse and WoWI made to block them, while at the same time they circumvented blocks Auctioneer tried to implement.
Yes, with me it’ll take a hell of a lot more effort to win me over than others because of my history with them, but there’s always a chance they could do it. I’m just not going to HELP them do it.
My opinions of WM’s business practices and my opinions of WM’s users are totally unrelated, you can search for a correlation if you want, but there isn’t one. The only opinion I have of WM users now is that the ones that “boycott” addon authors that don’t put their addons on WM probably don’t realize that they’re wasting their time. Authors really have nothing to lose from users refusing to use their addons, so their boycott really has no impact…
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
s/when/until/
Stupid can’t edit comments…
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
@Tekkub—You can’t edit them, but I can. ;)
@Tekkub
I’m going to agree with your position on the WM debate on every point, although I’ve never seen the need to use it, even though I have quite a few addons that I like to keep update.
I’ve never been able to convince myself that shopping around the various sites (usually on Tuesdays) and downloading updated versions manually was too much of an inconvenience. It’s just not that hard. You keep a list of your addons, which is conveniently maintained by windows (look at the folder), you take the 10 or so odd addons that are large and undergo frequent changes, you enter their names into the search field, and you download them.
I would however think it would be awesome if addon authors and distro sites started using a common tag or updates rss of some kind that could be queried by in-game addons, like your own Ampere (which I can’t live without) and let people know about new versions, and allow them to click a link that brings them to the addon developper’s site / curse page / repo / whathaveyou. Ampere just shades the name of the addon yellow if an update is discovered letting people know it’s time to check out the addon sites for updates.
I don’t know, maybe they already do have some data that can be queried? Maybe you could have one like that just for your own addons that talks to the repo?
@Dyna
Agreed, it just not that hard to manually update the addons you use. So, I never used WM (or Curse’s updated for that matter).
@Q
I was suggesting that I was trolling, because I saw the interview the day it was posted and didn’t really read any of the comments until I happened upon your “chat” with Tekkub yesterday.
“yes boss, I’m working”
@Dyna, the sites do provide tools… updater apps, favorites, email notices and rss feeds… but none of that can be used in-game. If it could there’d be a dozen addons out there doing it… hell most addons would probably check for updates on their own.
Tekkub´s last blog ..Horde wrath guides (finally!)
@Tekkub
Ah, that’s a bummer, I was always under the impression that addons could talk http if they wanted to, but simply didn’t because developers wanted to avoid having to explain the traffic to users.
Of course, it would probably open a whole new can of worms.
There is one idea I wanted to run by you since you are still reading these, our raid leader has started using the site wow-loot.com to determine which items might be main spec for certain classes and to see who might be better off receiving an item.
Would you think it would be a good idea to have, say an addon, or perhaps a modification to an addon like your Engravings that had “Best for these classes” perhaps using the wowhead data that is already there to get the gearscore, but simply parsed differently to list things similar to how wow-loot does it?
Can you someone please tell me if they know of an addon that changes the default look of the wow buttons not the action bar ones but the red ones with the yellow writing. I have looked around and cant find any. Also if there is an addon to change the look of the scroll bar.
@UnknownMystery I think Skinner will do that.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/skinner.aspx
@UnknownMystery The comments on this blog post is really not the place to ask, next time please send in a contact form! But yes, Dyna is right. Skinner is what you are looking for.
Thanks Dyna and Lilith and next time ill post my questions somewhere else however skinner doesn’t seem to be changing the buttons and i cant find an option to do so but ill look around.
Tekkub is the writer of many of the best addons ever and this interview is a cool peek inside his mind. I suspected the KISS principle was at the core of his addon design and it’s nice to see I was right. Great job to Tekkub and Matt for the interview!
I have used Tek’s addon’s since I started playing. He or she writes AddOns the efficient way or at least tries to. I believe he or she was one of the first(if not first) AddOn writers that coded their AddOns this way(and I’m mainly pointing at using the variable scope the correct way).
I also really like Tek’s AddOns because of the no-config style these AddOns have. Install, play, and you forget you have the AddOn running as the functionality is implemented very smoothly. Some of Tek’s AddOns require initial config however that is done really fast.
I also want to congratulate Tekkub that his or her AddOn Teknicolor will be integrated into the UI in 3.2 and I hope that Teknicolor will be supplementing it with features it currently has.
And just a simple question, I am not sure if Tekkub is male or female, he or she talks about his boyfriend a couple of times.
Is it me or is the date of the posts 11 days behind time? It is the 29th of juli at the moment of writing.
Tekkub. I just wanted to personally say thank you for the many long hard hours you’ve spent coding your add ons. More and more of your add ons have made their way into my wow experience, and for that I thank you. Mostly because I run on a sub-standard system. I come to this site for ideas and to see what’s out there, but know full well MOST of the add ons the users use to make the pretty effects to their UI will never have a place within mine, simply because my computer is old. Sluggish. And already performs so poorly. It might be my imagination but some of the ‘heavier’ add ons really seem to drain my system’s already overworked resources. I can’t say the same for any of the add ons you’ve ever written. My system seems to adjust to them perfectly and none of them have ever caused a problem. Not to mention your Ampere, helps make my system perform even better by being able to toggle between my ‘leveling’, my commerce, and my raiding add ons fairly seemlessly. Without having to obsessively log in and out. Huge hugs and many thank yous. :)
Oh. And I love the comments on this thread. It reminds me oddly of the huge content theft arguements I read on the forumns about Secondlife back in the day.
I think by and large that is my biggest issue with WM. The idea that they’re in someway kind of almost ’stealing’ authors hardwork. WM expecting the authors to pay the large bandwidth costs their add on generated, was horrid. It’s like a theif coming into your home to steal your money (revenue recieved from advertisements etc) and then sending you his medical bills when he falls and breaks his leg on the way out.
Users do begin to feel like they have certian ‘rights’ and expect some kind of ’support’ for the ad ons they use. But there are limits, or at least I believe there should be some boundries there to protect authors. At a certian point providing endless support can become quite a burden for an author, and can unfortunately drive them to simply stop creating, or worse stop releasing content if those limits boundries either a) dont exhist or b) aren’t respected.
And I think all Tek was suggesting was that there be a line there. A place where both user and authors needs can be supported, and by which communication can pass back and forth. By WM removing the chance for the two to meet, charging the authors the expense, and removing the authors abilities to have a say in how or where their content is distrbuted – I think WM more than crossed the line.
I’m not sure what WM has done to correct or improve things. I’ve never felt the need to use such add ons in the first place as a few well placed bookmarks for me has always been more than enough. But I think at this point given how badly they messed up and how deeply effected people were I really do think it is on them to go above and beyond to reach out to the people they’ve hurt or outraged if they want to be given legitimacy in the community again. It’s not on the authors to roll out the welcome mat and say hey ya’ll lets all get together and have cones and tea. It’s on WM to provide the peace offering. To go to the authors.
By and large I think users should be MORE offended at what WM did. I wish they had more respect and understanding that they put all of us users at risk — not just the authors. They had the ability to stop content providers of the ad ons from releasing their works for us by making it possible for the authors to simply not be able to afford the monetairy expense to host the add ons for our use.
@ Lilith
Re: “@UnknownMystery The comments on this blog post is really not the place to ask, next time please send in a contact form! But yes, Dyna is right. Skinner is what you are looking for.”
I’ve only recently found the UI community in the past month or two. Is there a centralish forum? Or blog list? Will nostockui ever consider adding forums?
I would like to know where is a good place to ask questions about addons (not specific ones like how to use tbag, but if i had a general question about what kind of bar mod i should use) and where I could post my UI and get feedback.
@Bruski: Try this: http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=d7f285e82b8d7937d72a2b606235f3e5
Ah, I am a foolish person and did not think to look there. Even though my main is a prot pally, I love your blog, and shall have fun in the UI forums I think. Your strategies and raid leadership advice has helped much in Ulduar.
/bow /thank Matticus
-Bruski of Ars Brute Squad, Chromaggus
Tekkub rocks – I’d prefer to be a hermit too but unfortunately I have to go into the office to code out Mortgage Apps :(.
[...] I will only post about those Tekkub addons that I am actually using myself, but for the whole masterlist, check out his website. Also well worth a read is an interview he once did with NoStock UI. [...]