Yeah, yeah. I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been hard at work on the the SC-BAT project, the kids have been taking turns being sick for more than a month, and when I get any spare time at all I’ve been playing World of Warcraft.

As a geek, one of the coolest things about WoW is that it is a completely customizable UI. It is basically a very good user customizable Smart Client. There is a back end server that keeps the world data and there is a rich interpreter on the front end that provides the user experience.

The shell of this application uses an interpreted scripting language called Lua and XML files (that look remarkably like XAML) to describe the frames, panels and UI elements. And… you can extend and customize this UI with your own plugins. In fact, there are whole community sites out there (like the one at WorldOfWar.net) that track and index all of the addons that are available.

Of course as a Smart Client geek, I can’t have all this power and not take advantage of it, right? So after spending the last month or so playing the game, learning how it works and trying out a number of different addons (aka ‘mods’), I decided it was time to start over and make my own custom UI.

Here is the result:

Here are the Add-ins I have installed right now:

For those of you who play WoW, I’d love to know what you think.

posted on Friday, April 07, 2006 9:45 AM
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