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12-21-14, 07:09 PM   #1
Phanx
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Trying again after a few months

Gave Minion another try since it's been a few months. Detecting WoW and installed addons was much, much faster, though this may be partly due to the fact that it let me pick which drives to scan and so only had to scan a small-ish SSD instead of a bunch of huge HDDs and network drives. However, most of the issues I described in my first impressions thread still stand, and overall it doesn't feel like an app that's being actively developed.

Still doesn't respect system DPI.

While the window itself is now resizable, the text in the addon list is still tiny (and poorly anti-aliased... or perhaps they're being rendered at an even smaller size and poorly up-scaled, either way resulting in a blobby spider-leg effect) and the contrast is still painfully low.

Still a few addon misidentifications:

Badapples (with a local Git repo) was incorrectly identified as Cirk's Badapples - Fan Update, which is extremely outdated and should have been moved to the Outdated Mods category long ago, but in any case, an exact title match on a newer addon should always win over a partial match on an older addon.

xMerchant was incorrectly identified as xMerchant Continued, which I guess is somewhat understandable since the version of xMerchant I'm using is only on Curse.

And a few addons that are on WoWI that weren't identified at all:And some that are working copies, but that doesn't stop Minion with other addons, so I don't think that's why they weren't detected:And some that are in the Oudated Mods category, but ideally should be matched anyway if there aren't any matches outside of the Outdated category:Still no detection of Git/SVN working copies.

This is a pretty critical feature for addon authors, and I can't imagine it should be difficult to implement at all -- just look for a ".git" or ".svn" folder (or whatever Mercurial uses) inside the addon folder. If one exists, the addon is a working copy and Minion should never touch it.

Tooltips on version numbers have an annoying delay.

I can never remember which box is the "installed version" and which is the "latest version on WoWI" -- a problem exacerbated by the fact that Minion does not even attempt to parse version numbers, and the fact that many addons on WoWI lag behind the latest version on Curse, so the "latest" version is often obviously lower than the "installed" version, making me doubt whether my recollection of which box is which is correct -- but the tooltip takes close to a full second to appear after placing the cursor over the box. If I hadn't assumed there were no tooltips on my first try, and found out about them because you mentioned them, I would still assume there were no tooltips due to the long delay.

Tooltips aren't ideal anyway; better solutions might be:
  • Add labels to the boxes, eg. "Latest: 1.8.50" and "Installed: 1.8.56"
  • Move a more column-oriented design like the Curse Client, where each piece of data has its own column, and the columns have headers with labels that can be clicked to change sorting.
Why does the "Update All" button even exist at this point?

Due to the lack of version number parsing, the "Update All" feature is only safe to use if you (a) don't develop addons (which admittedly applies to most people) and (b) never install or update addons from Curse (which probably applies only to a minority). Having the button there feels rather dangerous. One thoughtless or accidental click and I lose all my working copies and get a bunch of my addons rolled back to versions from months or even years ago.

Scrolling is still not smooth.

Easy to reproduce. Place the cursor over the addon list and rotate the mouse wheel at a constant rate. Scrolling very noticably does not happen at a constant rate. It may be slightly better than the first time I tried it, but since that was months ago it's hard to say for sure.

Row highlight still doesn't update properly while scrolling.

Place the cursor over an addon row and use the mouse wheel to scroll. The row highlight remains visible on the previously moused-over addon row, which is now further up the list, for a very noticable fraction of a second, before jumping down to the row that's now under the cursor. This creates a very distracting strobe-light effect.

Searching is very laggy.

When typing in the search box or clearing its contents, there's a very noticable delay before the addon list is updated.

Wrong cursor is often shown on addon rows.

I can reproduce this consistently by moving the cursor up and down the list of addons. It starts out showing the hand cursor, but after moving over a few rows, it switches to either the horizontal resize cursor (<==>) or the regular arrow cursor and continues displaying this wrong cursor until I mouse over something else (eg. an "update" button, or another program window).
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WoWInterface » Site Forums » Minion » Trying again after a few months

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