The Great UI Overhaul

For a while now I have been planning a UI overhaul. I want my UI to mesh properly across all my characters. With 2.4 and the release of Bongos3, this gives the perfect chance.

Goals.

I have this picture in my head of what I want to achieve here. I should point out that I am really only talking about setting up my action bars, though I will manipulate the remaining UI around this. Since I multibox, firstly want all of my characters to be interchangable. To this end I need to have the X-Keys layout consistant, match spells etc. I also want to be able to minimise the actionbars I use.

Macro's.

I have decided to try and use macro's for my druids instead of changing actionbars when changing forms. Here is an example of what I would have.

/cast [harm,nostance] wrath ;[help,nostance;nostance] rejuvination ;[stance:1] swipe ;[stance:3] Ferocious Bite ;[stealth] Ravage

OK lets break this down a little.
Firstly, anything contained within a [] is a condition. "," are like the logical AND while ";" are seperators, like an OR statement.
The first part of the macro says to use Wrath if you are not in a form (nostance) and your target is "Harmful". harm is defined by anything you can attack.
The next condition we have is "help, nostance" or "nostance". This means that you are in Caster form and either have no target or you are targeting a non hostile. In this case Rejuvination is shown.
Next you will see "stance:1". This is bear form. Therefore if you are in bearform, swipe. "stance:3" is Cat form, which inturn is Ferocious Bite.
Finally you have "Stealth". When you are stealthed, this will show Ravage.
There are two more things to remember. Firstly, if you choose the "?" icon for your macro image, then the image will update based on the condition. Secondly, if you make the first line of your macro, "#showtooltip", then the spell will also show the tooltip on mouseover.

What will this achieve?

Thats easy, instead of having a Caster, Bear, Cat, Stealth and even heal pages on your actionbar, I will just one bar.

Resolution.

Now for the tricky part. As I have shown previously, I use 2 monitors. The Slave is 1024x768 and the Master is 1680x1050. Since I have the Slave monitor broken up into Top half and bottom half, it leaves me with a 1024x384 resolution. What I would like to do is design the UI for the Master, then copy it over to the slave and modify it to fix. Hopefully with the very little adjustments.

When?

Well I actually started on this last night. I had an hour to play so I had most of the Macro's discussed setup when my PC crashed. I will really have to Format my OS before I attempt this, which will probably be the weekend.

Razorbax