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IMO, it is based on the user. In my experience, that's how it was, since at that time I was playing WoW with 512mb only and I have to care a lot about alot of things like keeping the memory light, avoiding plenty of bugs (there are less bugs using Ace that time compared to others), etc. Since having a low-end PC means I have to wait long while the addons are getting fired up after logging-in.
I'm going to guess that you started using Ace-based addons early on, before all of the rabid adopters. In that case, the framework was being used by people who were rather competent coders and who knew how and when to use the Ace libraries.
When I moved to Ace, it definitely was "better" than the addons I came from. Yes, many will argue that Ace doesn't really or is not any better than the other addons. Many will argue that Ace is not the reason for low memory usage. But, as a user who was using a low-end PC during the early days, Ace did it.
Addons which use Ace libraries are only as good as the knowledge and grasp of concepts of person who programmed them. There are some really shitty addons using Ace libraries. There are also some very good addons which don't.
So in my PoV, Ace is leading the trend, even though I agree to the points made above and in the past of what Ace isn't. There are two sides in this, the technical side where the code tells us there really isn't any significant improvements versus other libs or addons (or license); vs an actual user experience.
There are very significant improvements when using the libraries if:
You know what you're doing (as an author) and are using it for an explicit purpose - such as not re-inventing the wheel.
Your addon is rather complex and not only do you not feel like re-inventing the wheel, but you'd like to reduce your users' memory footprint by using the shared library.
Kaelten, I completely agree with you. See I never said everybody is welcome. I said I hope friendly, well-meaning users are.
People who flame, exploit and plain don't care about how their actions impact others don't belong into that category.
My initial gripe was that random people called for vigilanti justice (flaming) to themselves decide who isn't welcome, and that I objected too... because I see that as counter productive to the community.
That you and proper moderation overall is the way to go is what I wanted all along.
Re: Ace. Well Ace is a brand, a lib, a community, etc. Clearly it's a positive brand. While I agree that part of the positive brand are misconceptions I for one don't think there is a major issue with it. If an addon had an -Ace2- label but didn't work properly, or didn't work at all, it wouldn't be used. A positive brand only goes so far. But yeah there are addons that can be written more concisely without any libs. But, and I think this is where I differ with some people on the issue, very often it plainly doesn't matter from a user's perspective (or in fact it does in other way). One is performance. I continue to be amazed how much stuff one can do with WoW API lua code before there is a performance issue. For a lot of users, this is what matters: What does it do on the surface and do I perceive a problem? If the answer is no, the guts don't matter, and that makes a lot of sense to me (while I can see that this may be hard to swallow for an author who spent time writing very compact and elegant code, because the user who thinks that way neglects the appreciation for the difference).
But there is more to this. Ace also stands for a community. People have learned that addons here are well supported. I do remember the 2.0.x transition where many many Ace based addons and addons written by people who hang around in this community were up and running while their non-Ace popular counterparts were scrambling or even died completely. This isn't a direct measure of quality of code, but quality of community. In fact I'm sure a lot of people don't even know which of the addons they use really do use any Ace libs. I don't think that a lot of users make a deep distinction between the code and the community that supports it. And that isn't complete lunacy. By there being an active and vibrant community with a lot of domain knowledge, there is a better chance of quality stuff happening.
Now I totally agree that the Ace label doesn't guarantee the best-written addon, and we can name some good examples, but by always emphasising this when people come and talk positively about Ace, even if ill-informed I think we short-change a lot of the above reasons that ultimately are positive and not at all damaged by the fact that not everybody understands all nuance. I for one would be much more bothered if lots of people due to lack of information felt poorly about Ace as both a lib set and a community.
Finally even for the informed, the question when to use a lib or not is part opinion and in the eye of the respective beholders. But that there is lots of discussion about this is certainly a great part of this community. And so we end up with multiple addons doing similar things, which in my mind is nothing but great, because there is more of a chance that you find something that matches your preferences and preconceptions.
I'm going to guess that you started using Ace-based addons early on, before all of the rabid adopters. In that case, the framework was being used by people who were rather competent coders and who knew how and when to use the Ace libraries.
Yep, that is correct. I wasn't as Ace'd as I am now compared to the early days, but I felt the difference back then especially with using a low-end machine.
Addons which use Ace libraries are only as good as the knowledge and grasp of concepts of person who programmed them. There are some really shitty addons using Ace libraries. There are also some very good addons which don't.
Couldn't agree more. I think as you've said above, that time, there "were rather competent coders and who knew how and when to use" this and that. (Not that we have less competent coders today.)
There are very significant improvements when using the libraries if:
You know what you're doing (as an author) and are using it for an explicit purpose - such as not re-inventing the wheel.
Your addon is rather complex and not only do you not feel like re-inventing the wheel, but you'd like to reduce your users' memory footprint by using the shared library.
And so we end up with multiple addons doing similar things, which in my mind is nothing but great, because there is more of a chance that you find something that matches your preferences and preconceptions.
I'd like to add that, the setup of Ace and how it developed, as Kaelten said - Standalone Libs, IMO fueled its success and popularity. I mean, compared to other projects where you have to use the package itself (I'm sure those who played WoW during its first few months know which packages I'm referring to), with Ace, there is freedom to choose what you want.
just my 2 cents about why WAU is needed (not just for power users):
there are some addons that NEED to be as up to date as possible.
First and foremost... Omen.
Second.. BigWigs, Recount.
A lot of people chose to use WAU and the inherent instability of beta addons, because of these addons that need to be up-to-date..and are allways in flux. It;s ok to raid with out of date action bar addon or unit frame addon. But u need Omen and BigWigs to be as new as possible.
just my 2 cents about why WAU is needed (not just for power users):
there are some addons that NEED to be as up to date as possible.
First and foremost... Omen.
Second.. BigWigs, Recount.
A lot of people chose to use WAU and the inherent instability of beta addons, because of these addons that need to be up-to-date..and are allways in flux. It;s ok to raid with out of date action bar addon or unit frame addon. But u need Omen and BigWigs to be as new as possible.
And WAU was the only option.
WAU and any updater for that matter is only for convenience. If you really need every commit, there is SVN for that.
You can always manually download the updates. The addons you mentioned do not update every minute, do not update every hour, and do not update every day.
Then for BigWigs, there is DBM. So now you are down to just Omen and Recount from your example.
You play WoW for at least 3 hours, especially if you are raiding. You don't just say:
"Hold on guys, I have to run my WAU coz there must be a new commit of Omen, BigWigs, and Recount. You guys should to..."
Am I wrong with that?
WAU is important fine, but it is not a 'need', it is only a 'want'.
You can always use Curse Client or any other client that you want, for just those 3 addons you mentioned. That seems to be the "no-raid-if-you-dont-have-it" addons.
Still, we always return to the fact that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with downloading manually 3 add-ons that does not update every minute, hour, or days.
azmodanrom sorry to burst your bubble, but Omen was stable about 1 week or so after the major patch, and BigWigs hasn't change that often either.
The authors are quite consistent about that. A slight timer adjustment here, a + or - sign there in threat, but all in all. You could prolly could several weeks if not months with out updating either and be JUST fine. In fact the vast majority of changes to both addons, as well as most of the svn, was localization changes. Now if your a non-enUS locale, then i see your point.
just my 2 cents about why WAU is needed (not just for power users):
there are some addons that NEED to be as up to date as possible.
There is always the option to clone the repository, develop on one and make the minor threat adjustments in the mainline and just commit everything with "stable" in that tree. Ok, there could be a 20 minute delay but if you care about 20 minutes... :p
I will miss WAU, and like most have said while it is not necessary it is very convenient. I have not posted here, but I have always looked if Bug Sack caught an error to make sure it had been reported already, but I was turned on to WoW Ace a long time ago by a friend, and I will take this time to thank all the People that made this possible while it was available. So there, I finally found a NEED to register (not to report a bug/bad add on) but for a simple thank you for the time/money spent making this possible. I have used both Cursed and WoWUI, and I will do so more now, and I hope that as the Curse Client develops they will see fit to make it more like WAU than it is now.
The names of the people, not that of the library itself.
I find _that_ usage highly annoying and misleading, though, because an aberration of an addon that happens to use the Ace framework is not a superior product by virtue of that fact.
Unfortunately, there are many end-users who are confused on this issue and religiously download anything with a name like "AddonAce" or "AceAssistant" and are comforted by seeing a colored -Ace- next to the name of their addon when viewing their addon list in-game. This, in turn, leads many naive addon authors to "make it Ace!" in cases where it is completely unnecessary to - turning a 30-line addon into a much larger one with the embedded libraries which they didn't need in the first place.
This reminded me of some addons that got listed in the "request" category to be made "ACE" (I know it's Ace guys, but the question was to have AddonA ACEd). The funny thing was, the addons were already used Ace libs, they just didn't have the -Ace- tag in their listing in the wow client itself.
I will miss WAU, and like most have said while it is not necessary it is very convenient. I have not posted here, but I have always looked if Bug Sack caught an error to make sure it had been reported already, but I was turned on to WoW Ace a long time ago by a friend, and I will take this time to thank all the People that made this possible while it was available. So there, I finally found a NEED to register (not to report a bug/bad add on) but for a simple thank you for the time/money spent making this possible. I have used both Cursed and WoWUI, and I will do so more now, and I hope that as the Curse Client develops they will see fit to make it more like WAU than it is now.
This made me smile, people like you, we welcome with open arms :)
I came to WowAce because of finding some of the WowAce mods on "distribution" sites. Then I often found here that someone had made a mod that did what I was looking for. But I only installed WAU months later because of not always getting the libraries thing right. WAU always got it right. I didn't feel it was a convience so much I wasn't breaking stuff. And for a bit no other "updater" got it right. I still manually install a majority of the addon's I use from curse, wowi, or directly from the author's site. And I've tried to be good about searching for the error messages before I post in any forum. Plus I've spent time reading not just these forums, but forums in other places to learn as much as I can so I can troubleshoot things on my own. And to help out guildies who are having problems getting mods working.
I am a user, and a coder of other languages. I've done some reading on lua, but I'm not sure that I will ever write any lua code. Does that make me bad or unwelcome cause I'm not a dev? I have no issue with saying there are people who do it better, but should it result in a wall that divides the haves from the have nots? But I digress....
But with this change to Curse, it doesn't feel like it's paying for bandwidth (cause in reality all of us are already paying for bandwidth from our homes to where ever we're connecting to). It does feel like it's paying for the convience of one button to update it all. I have donated to mod authors (the most noteable is Auctioneer), and I would have donated here also. It seems however, that I would be in the minority.
Now it seems that WowAce is a victim of it's own success.
I think there is a huge amount of underestimation of how much WAU contributed to the success of Ace addons.
Release often release early. That's how you prevent bugs.
Within minutes of a commit addon authors here would get reports if something broke. That's now gone. It's sad. Now there will be broken 'releases' downloaded by millions. :(
There will be fewer people downloading things they never should have, because they were works in progress and not ready for release.
Trust me, a broken release being pushed to curse.com is going to be worse than any number of clueless people using trunk. Atleast when they're using the trunk they're going to get the fix right away when it's commited.
Atleast when they're using the trunk they're going to get the fix right away when it's commited.
And that's exactly what was wrong with the old model. WAU should never have been allowed to package stuff from the trunk but rather from a stable tag which would force authors to not be lazy and tag their releases, while being free to continue development in either trunk or branches and optionally tag those as well as "betas". This is exactly what is being done now. As a result users won't get needless updates because a character was changed in the localization for the lost tribe in Amazon etc. They will still be able to get beta releases if an author wants them to, but generally they will have a much more stable UI.
Trust me, a broken release being pushed to curse.com is going to be worse than any number of clueless people using trunk. Atleast when they're using the trunk they're going to get the fix right away when it's commited.
Authors can opt out of pushing their releases to Curse, from what I understand. There's really far less chance of people unknowingly getting their hands on a mod that's not ready for public consumption.
.... And I've tried to be good about searching for the error messages before I post in any forum. Plus I've spent time reading not just these forums, but forums in other places to learn as much as I can so I can troubleshoot things on my own. And to help out guildies who are having problems getting mods working.
I am a user, and a coder of other languages. I've done some reading on lua, but I'm not sure that I will ever write any lua code. Does that make me bad or unwelcome cause I'm not a dev?
Well, to clarify, we are a Developer community. One cannot develop with out beta testers.. you would be considered a tester after a sort. Your fine, infact belong to a needed part of this community, "The Beta Testers" :D
The only thing that makes one unwelcome here is when one gets it in their head that they are entitled to something that they are not, and gets angry over it.
Massive market, with people that liked the product community and product. But unsted of capitalising on it the choice was to piss lots of people off?
My only question here is "Who did you sell out to?"
Why are you bothering to Troll? You will only get pounced on and chased out of here. Read the various stickies that are posted. The answers are there and in excellent detail that is understandable by laymen.
Why are you bothering to Troll? You will only get pounced on and chased out of here. Read the various stickies that are posted. The answers are there and in excellent detail that is understandable by laymen.
I am simply stating the only obvious conclusion anyone can come to, after 2 weeks of reading. The only Logical conclusion that anyone can come to here is, that someone was paid a lot of money to back step a very popular website and piece of software so that someone else can make money. (I am pretty sure thatâs the definition of âSold outâ)
I do not accuse anyone of not making the right choice I am just irritated that clearly someone could have made a lot of money from splitting the site in development and realise and fully developing WAU rather than throwing it away and telling everyone to go talk to the guys at Curse. They have a much crappier product but you guys are costing me too much money.
I can't say I would not have taken the same path. But clearly some one sold out or was very lazy. Either of which annoy me.
I frequented this site and I clicked on the ads in WAU. I laughed when I read the posts about all this starting and thought surely the idea of a web site is to attract people to it and inevitable make money. Why would some one complain about too many people visiting a website?
So I stand by statement and I am sorry to see that some one has chosen to doom a website rather than make it flourish.
Thank you while is lasted, back to manual updates I suppose. I choose not to Curse my computer.
P.S. Really do you think that I would care about being chased away from a website/forum that is now useless to me? I was simply airing my frustration at some ones choices as I walked out the door.
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Project AuthorI'm going to guess that you started using Ace-based addons early on, before all of the rabid adopters. In that case, the framework was being used by people who were rather competent coders and who knew how and when to use the Ace libraries.
Addons which use Ace libraries are only as good as the knowledge and grasp of concepts of person who programmed them. There are some really shitty addons using Ace libraries. There are also some very good addons which don't.
There are very significant improvements when using the libraries if:
People who flame, exploit and plain don't care about how their actions impact others don't belong into that category.
My initial gripe was that random people called for vigilanti justice (flaming) to themselves decide who isn't welcome, and that I objected too... because I see that as counter productive to the community.
That you and proper moderation overall is the way to go is what I wanted all along.
Re: Ace. Well Ace is a brand, a lib, a community, etc. Clearly it's a positive brand. While I agree that part of the positive brand are misconceptions I for one don't think there is a major issue with it. If an addon had an -Ace2- label but didn't work properly, or didn't work at all, it wouldn't be used. A positive brand only goes so far. But yeah there are addons that can be written more concisely without any libs. But, and I think this is where I differ with some people on the issue, very often it plainly doesn't matter from a user's perspective (or in fact it does in other way). One is performance. I continue to be amazed how much stuff one can do with WoW API lua code before there is a performance issue. For a lot of users, this is what matters: What does it do on the surface and do I perceive a problem? If the answer is no, the guts don't matter, and that makes a lot of sense to me (while I can see that this may be hard to swallow for an author who spent time writing very compact and elegant code, because the user who thinks that way neglects the appreciation for the difference).
But there is more to this. Ace also stands for a community. People have learned that addons here are well supported. I do remember the 2.0.x transition where many many Ace based addons and addons written by people who hang around in this community were up and running while their non-Ace popular counterparts were scrambling or even died completely. This isn't a direct measure of quality of code, but quality of community. In fact I'm sure a lot of people don't even know which of the addons they use really do use any Ace libs. I don't think that a lot of users make a deep distinction between the code and the community that supports it. And that isn't complete lunacy. By there being an active and vibrant community with a lot of domain knowledge, there is a better chance of quality stuff happening.
Now I totally agree that the Ace label doesn't guarantee the best-written addon, and we can name some good examples, but by always emphasising this when people come and talk positively about Ace, even if ill-informed I think we short-change a lot of the above reasons that ultimately are positive and not at all damaged by the fact that not everybody understands all nuance. I for one would be much more bothered if lots of people due to lack of information felt poorly about Ace as both a lib set and a community.
Finally even for the informed, the question when to use a lib or not is part opinion and in the eye of the respective beholders. But that there is lots of discussion about this is certainly a great part of this community. And so we end up with multiple addons doing similar things, which in my mind is nothing but great, because there is more of a chance that you find something that matches your preferences and preconceptions.
Yep, that is correct. I wasn't as Ace'd as I am now compared to the early days, but I felt the difference back then especially with using a low-end machine.
Couldn't agree more. I think as you've said above, that time, there "were rather competent coders and who knew how and when to use" this and that. (Not that we have less competent coders today.)
Very well true.
I'd like to add that, the setup of Ace and how it developed, as Kaelten said - Standalone Libs, IMO fueled its success and popularity. I mean, compared to other projects where you have to use the package itself (I'm sure those who played WoW during its first few months know which packages I'm referring to), with Ace, there is freedom to choose what you want.
there are some addons that NEED to be as up to date as possible.
First and foremost... Omen.
Second.. BigWigs, Recount.
A lot of people chose to use WAU and the inherent instability of beta addons, because of these addons that need to be up-to-date..and are allways in flux. It;s ok to raid with out of date action bar addon or unit frame addon. But u need Omen and BigWigs to be as new as possible.
And WAU was the only option.
WAU and any updater for that matter is only for convenience. If you really need every commit, there is SVN for that.
You can always manually download the updates. The addons you mentioned do not update every minute, do not update every hour, and do not update every day.
Then for BigWigs, there is DBM. So now you are down to just Omen and Recount from your example.
You play WoW for at least 3 hours, especially if you are raiding. You don't just say:
"Hold on guys, I have to run my WAU coz there must be a new commit of Omen, BigWigs, and Recount. You guys should to..."
Am I wrong with that?
WAU is important fine, but it is not a 'need', it is only a 'want'.
You can always use Curse Client or any other client that you want, for just those 3 addons you mentioned. That seems to be the "no-raid-if-you-dont-have-it" addons.
Still, we always return to the fact that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with downloading manually 3 add-ons that does not update every minute, hour, or days.
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Curse PremiumThe authors are quite consistent about that. A slight timer adjustment here, a + or - sign there in threat, but all in all. You could prolly could several weeks if not months with out updating either and be JUST fine. In fact the vast majority of changes to both addons, as well as most of the svn, was localization changes. Now if your a non-enUS locale, then i see your point.
There is always the option to clone the repository, develop on one and make the minor threat adjustments in the mainline and just commit everything with "stable" in that tree. Ok, there could be a 20 minute delay but if you care about 20 minutes... :p
This reminded me of some addons that got listed in the "request" category to be made "ACE" (I know it's Ace guys, but the question was to have AddonA ACEd). The funny thing was, the addons were already used Ace libs, they just didn't have the -Ace- tag in their listing in the wow client itself.
This made me smile, people like you, we welcome with open arms :)
I am a user, and a coder of other languages. I've done some reading on lua, but I'm not sure that I will ever write any lua code. Does that make me bad or unwelcome cause I'm not a dev? I have no issue with saying there are people who do it better, but should it result in a wall that divides the haves from the have nots? But I digress....
But with this change to Curse, it doesn't feel like it's paying for bandwidth (cause in reality all of us are already paying for bandwidth from our homes to where ever we're connecting to). It does feel like it's paying for the convience of one button to update it all. I have donated to mod authors (the most noteable is Auctioneer), and I would have donated here also. It seems however, that I would be in the minority.
Now it seems that WowAce is a victim of it's own success.
Release often release early. That's how you prevent bugs.
Within minutes of a commit addon authors here would get reports if something broke. That's now gone. It's sad. Now there will be broken 'releases' downloaded by millions. :(
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Curse PremiumTrust me, a broken release being pushed to curse.com is going to be worse than any number of clueless people using trunk. Atleast when they're using the trunk they're going to get the fix right away when it's commited.
And that's exactly what was wrong with the old model. WAU should never have been allowed to package stuff from the trunk but rather from a stable tag which would force authors to not be lazy and tag their releases, while being free to continue development in either trunk or branches and optionally tag those as well as "betas". This is exactly what is being done now. As a result users won't get needless updates because a character was changed in the localization for the lost tribe in Amazon etc. They will still be able to get beta releases if an author wants them to, but generally they will have a much more stable UI.
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Curse PremiumAuthors can opt out of pushing their releases to Curse, from what I understand. There's really far less chance of people unknowingly getting their hands on a mod that's not ready for public consumption.
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Curse PremiumWell, to clarify, we are a Developer community. One cannot develop with out beta testers.. you would be considered a tester after a sort. Your fine, infact belong to a needed part of this community, "The Beta Testers" :D
The only thing that makes one unwelcome here is when one gets it in their head that they are entitled to something that they are not, and gets angry over it.
Massive market, with people that liked the product community and product. But unsted of capitalising on it the choice was to piss lots of people off?
My only question here is "Who did you sell out to?"
Why are you bothering to Troll? You will only get pounced on and chased out of here. Read the various stickies that are posted. The answers are there and in excellent detail that is understandable by laymen.
I am simply stating the only obvious conclusion anyone can come to, after 2 weeks of reading. The only Logical conclusion that anyone can come to here is, that someone was paid a lot of money to back step a very popular website and piece of software so that someone else can make money. (I am pretty sure thatâs the definition of âSold outâ)
I do not accuse anyone of not making the right choice I am just irritated that clearly someone could have made a lot of money from splitting the site in development and realise and fully developing WAU rather than throwing it away and telling everyone to go talk to the guys at Curse. They have a much crappier product but you guys are costing me too much money.
I can't say I would not have taken the same path. But clearly some one sold out or was very lazy. Either of which annoy me.
I frequented this site and I clicked on the ads in WAU. I laughed when I read the posts about all this starting and thought surely the idea of a web site is to attract people to it and inevitable make money. Why would some one complain about too many people visiting a website?
So I stand by statement and I am sorry to see that some one has chosen to doom a website rather than make it flourish.
Thank you while is lasted, back to manual updates I suppose. I choose not to Curse my computer.
P.S. Really do you think that I would care about being chased away from a website/forum that is now useless to me? I was simply airing my frustration at some ones choices as I walked out the door.