Tool For Managing Add-ons
One of the coolest pieces of software I have ever seen in a long time is a program called Wow Matrix. It helps you manage your Warcraft add-ons, removing the necessity of searching the Internet for the various add-ons that you might want to use, get updates for, or even search for. Not only that, it will install them for you as well as update regularly.
When you open the program, you have two tabs that you can look at. One shows you the add-ons that you currently have installed and whether they are up to date. The second tab shows a long list of add-ons that are available to be installed. On both tabs they give a short description of what the add-on does. This makes it really easy to pick which add-ons that you want to add.
I would be careful about adding too many add-ons at once though. All add-ons affect the user interface in some way, and too many changes at once could be quite confusing. Until you get used to using an add-on, you don’t always know how to manage the configuration. If you have more than one new add-on, it might be confusing as to which of them is affecting your user interface in a negative way. I currently limit myself to one new add-on per day, so I can get used to what ever an add-on is doing for me. Then once I have the configuration exactly the way I want, I can add a new one without fear of getting too confused. And at my age that’s an important thing!
Wow Matrix is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux… but I have only used it for Windows, so I cannot speak to how it works on the other operating systems.
I love WoWMatix, it’s the most time saving app that you can have!
The sad thing is that I only just learned about it a few days ago, and how easy it is to use. No I don’t need to delay looking for that update, or spend a bunch of time googling around for a specific add-on whose name I can’t remember, etc…
Apparently, Mod-devs hate it because it means no-one has to go to their sites anymore
Yep, WoWMatrix is, in my opinion, indispensable if you are going to be maintaining addons in WoW. Having a one-stop tool to find new addons, and keep existing ones up to date is awesome. Being able to uninstall on top of that is just gravy.
Totally true about the deletion aspect of it. I used to worry about removing an add-on, because I was not sure if it was a dependency for one I wanted to keep using. WoWMatrix tells you if there is a dependency, and what it is. I have taken to removing one unused add-on per day, which is really cleaning up my files, not to mention my character add-on list.
Sevei, you are right about the developers not getting as much traffic. In fact, this is one of the first things I thought of when I installed it. But maybe the developers will fins ways to advertise their pages within the add-ons interfaces. If not, they will simply need to come up with some other ways to get us to visit
Wowmatrix sucks. It causes a lot of problems and just pulls the addon from random websites - even when the Author has asked that it not be posted there.
If you want a real addon management tool, take a look at WUU. You can install an addon from a URL from any of the main sites and it will install and update as that website gets updated.
Bob:
Can you provide any more details? What sort of problems has WowMatrix caused for you, or for others that you have heard of?
Also, how is WUU different…I only took a brief look at their site (http://wuu.vagabonds.info/menu.php for those of you who want to check it out), and it appears to be similar — at least at first glance.