[Maul]

The following is a post I made on WoWInterface in answering the "whys" of discontinuing "Trinity Bars" and making "Macaroon". By this time, the "shock" should have subsided, but I post it here for the curious

First, I need to make an addon that was easier to maintain. The direction I was going with the whole TrinityUI thing was taking that in the wrong direction. I was making things too complex for myself where I almost got to the point that I had to document for myself my own "API".

Second, two things made me delve deeper into the world of macros - playing my mage to 70 and multi-boxing. Prior to that, I was not a heavy macro user. However, while going through the above, I found myself using the macro side of Trinity more and more and began to feel how "clunky" it felt to keep macros up-to-date. So I decided to make a macro-only bar addon - Macaroon.

Third, there are already action bar addon choices out there. I saw a hole for a macro addon. People want more of them. They want longer macros. They want an easier way to manage them. True, there are some macro solutions out there, but there was yet to be a "macro-bar" addon. So I decided to make the first truly macro-focused bar addon. So I started throwing it together, basically starting fresh where I knew I had issues in Trinity (I call them coding knots), but re-using Trinity's code where it was proven to be rock-solid. Macaroon, to me, has proven to be a much more enjoyable addon to code and maintain than Trinity, so I started to see what I could add to it. And I have not stopped adding yet. To date, Macaroon is almost as functional as Trinity. Only a few key features are missing, but I plan to add them as well (like anchor buttons).

I intended to update Trinity, but as I developed Macaroon more, it became obvious to me that the differences to the end user were small. To me, maintaining such addons as an author, the differences were huge. And I was getting plenty of positive feedback from Trinity users, such as being much easier to configure.

Fourth, I decided this time around to get all those extra items put into a totally separate addon, Macaroon Xtras. Those bars had been the most irritating for me to deal with in Trinity, mostly because of mistakes I made in how I set up handling them. But it was not easy to undo those mistakes without doing exactly what I did with Macaroon. Re-write with a clearer direction of where to go and remembering lessons learned.

Fifth, WoW 3.0 brings some big changes to action bar addons, almost to the same level as WoW 2.0. At least from an author's perspective. The whole internal mechanisms had to be re-coded from scratch. I was initially using Macaroon as a "test-bed" for learning the new API. However, it soon became apparent to me that really if I were to keep a "Trinity" addon going, all it would be is a Macaroon addon with a Trinity name. I was faced with possibility of maintaining two addons that were virtually identical for the sake of a name.

Why the name change, then? Why not keep "Trinity"? Well, I felt "Trinity" was feeling heavy. I wanted something that sounded more fun and light. I knew it was going to be a macro-bar addon, so I was looking for Mac-somthing. I went over a bunch in my head. And since I happen to *love* macaroons, it was the name that took. I also wanted to back away from the uni-name titles of my addons. It was a neat idea at first, thinking I would release a whole suite of "Trinity" addons (and indeed during WoW 2.0 I had many more "Trinity" addons I had never released), but yet again, the effort to maintain my own libraries across all the addons was becoming some serious work. So, in the end, I wanted to break away from the Trinity name (not because I don't like it, but because I want to be more creative and flexible in my addon making endeavors) and not lock myself down to a mono-theme name.

So, here we have Macaroon. It is, for all intents and purposes, really Trinity Bars 3.0, but with a new name and a new coding structure that will make it easier for me. So far during the public testing phase of Macaroon, issues have been minimal. And I don't get daily messages of "well, this is broken now, but thanks for fixing this!" which kinda stressed me out, to be honest. I needed to break away from where it was all going or I was just going to throw in the towel and stop publicly making a bar addon. I make addons for enjoyment, and Trinity was not heading in that direction.

Macaroon has been a new invigoration in terms of coding. Everything is falling into place and tough issues I had in Trinity are just being naturally solved via the new coding. The key to this all is that I am aiming to get to a point where I can release a version of Macaroon and it will stay stable for many months until Blizzard API changes affect it, not because I am constantly trying to undo tightly-tied coding knots I made in Trinity's code.

Macaroon is a new breed of bar addon, as well: a macro-bar addon. "Feel the power of macros" is a good catch phrase for it. Trinity was a highly involved action-bar addon that happen to do macros as well. My bar addon focus has shifted, and Macaroon reflects that in both design and name.

I can only hope that most Trinity users will like Macaroon as much as Trinity. The spirit and soul of Trinity is indeed in Macaroon. And I also hope that those who enjoyed the Trinity journey will join me on the Macaroon journey, as it is already going places Trinity has not.

-Maul