WowAce.com

NewsFlash: Incoming Improvements to the Curse Client

The State of the Client

I want to start out by stating that we're well aware of the issues. We're not deluded into thinking that the current state of the Curse Client is as good as it gets.

Up until this point I've been on the sidelines of the Client, however I'm pleased to say that I'm taking over the project and will be leading product development on the client.

I've spent a large portion of my time over the last several weeks reading forums and talking to people to get a better idea of what people want, need, and hate.

We've recently broken 500,000 Client installs. While that is a very exciting number for us to reach, it also shows us the level of responsibility we have to making sure that the client is the best possible.

The Big Issues

It is the primary purpose of this announcement to help communicate what's going to be changing in the near future. But first let me recap some of the things that are definite issues(in no particular order). This is also not necessarily an all inclusive list.

  • Ignoring manual deletions
  • Installing over addons
  • Downgrading addons
  • UI feedback failures
  • Poorly worded options and button text
  • Too much automation in some places, too little automation in others
  • Lack of features that are considered defacto standards
  • General reliability

Now I want to tell you what we're going to be doing in order to improve things.

What we're going to do about it!

UI Changes

First we're giving the UI an overhaul. The overall goal here is to make sure that the interface is more intuitive, more usable, and that it gives better feedback about what it's doing. To that end we're taking the following steps:

  • In an effort to increase the usefulness of the listings we're making the bottom details pane shrinkable so that you can see more addons listed at a time. You'll be able to view it if you want, but if you prefer you'll be able to use the full size of the window for the listings. Long term you'll even be able to decide what portion of the window is taken up by the bottom pane.
  • We're taking and applying some background colors the listings in order to let you know what' s happening.
    • Gray - For svn, git, and mercurial working copies.
    • Yellow - Ignored addons.
    • Red - Addons that are out of date.
    • Green - Addons that have been updated recently.
    • Purple (maybe) - Addons with unrecognizable versions. (more on that later)

In addition to the above colors we're going to be using sorting to help it make sense. All Yellows and Grays will be forced to the bottom of the listings. All Red and Purples(?) will be forced to the top for easy identification.

  • We're rewording the buttons to make things make more sense to the end user. Intuitiveness is a major concern.
  • Version numbers will be defaulted to instead of dates in the addon listings. We will provide an option for people who prefer dates.
  • Reorganization of the buttons and other controls so that the important ones are more obvious.

We're also going to be enhancing the activity log panel, making some adjustments to the change log viewers, redoing the listing controls to allow you more options, adding more messages back to the user, etc.

New Features

Like I mentioned before we're missing de facto features. And we'll be moving quickly to add them.

  • Alternate Packages - Up until now we've called this disembedded support. It is coming back.
  • Dependency Resolution
  • Manual Deletion Detection
  • Alpha Support
  • Multiple Game Support - So you can manage your PTR or Beta installs separately of your main install
  • Version Pinning - Installation of a specific version.
  • Submodule support - For example you'll be able to selectively install or update to a specific sub folders of an addon.
  • Saved Variable Scrubber - This will be on demand clean up, it will NEVER run automatically.
  • Automated and Manual Backups - We will keep an automatic backup of addons on update. And you'll be able to manually backup and restore a full backup on command.
  • Real Configuration Box
  • Deletion before upgrade - This will probably be enabled by default, I'm open to feedback though. Keep in mind that with the new fingerprint system (outlined below) a dirty upgrade could break future updates.
  • Uninstalled Package Listing - We'll be showing you a new tab of all Unrecognized packs. Limited management will be available via this listing. You'll be able to remove them, and try to identify them.

Several of these above features are considered to be advanced features and we will be labeling them as such.

Changed Behaviors & Methods

One of the larger problems we've faced is about it auto detecting the wrong addons and/or downgrading or otherwise installing things wrongly.

We're taking a few steps to fixing these problems.

Discovery and Detection of versions

First, we're changing our auto detection code. In the next major release we're switching away from toc name based matching to instead use unique version fingerprints. We will both be fingerprinting individual files and packages as a whole in order to know for sure what version you're using.

Because of the fact that this will allow us to know within a very high level of accuracy in identifying exactly what version of a addon you're using we'll be able to reliably recommend upgrades.

The question shifted at that point to knowing what to do when we don't recognize the files. So we're changing the behavior some. For unrecognized packages we'll be displaying a special Unrecognized status. From that point on we won't update the addon until either a) you tell the client to or b) we learn for sure what version that is.

This does have one potential issue, or in some cases a feature, for auto discovery. If you go in and edit an addon, add a file, remove a file, etc the fingerprint of the file will change and then the fingerprint of the whole package will change.

In the case of initial discovery we won't be able to auto detect what project the files belong to. If we do know what project the file belongs to it becomes an Unrecognized version and will no longer be updated until you tell the client to do so. Down side, if you have some zombie files in your directory from unclean upgrades you'll need to manually match the project or tell it to upgrade.

The current toc name based scanner will still be available for suggesting matches in the new Uninstalled Package Listings.

Changes to Defaults

We're changing a few default behaviors. We'll no longer be defaulting to fully automatic addons update as this seems to be counter to the majority of our users usage patterns. We'll be shifting the defaults throughout the client to match the default behaviors of our users.

Popup Questions

These annoying repetitive popup questions will be streamlined out of the client. Anytime we find ourselves saying "well we could ask the user...." we're going to smack ourselves and find away to do it without that.


As a result of the above changes, if anything we'll be overly cautious about doing the wrong thing.

The Mac Version

Having a fully functional Client under Mac is very important to us. We know that it does not follow many of the standard conventions on macs at this time. We will be addressing as many of those as possible, however our first focus is on having a solid product with all the needed features. After we get there we will then focus on asethetics and the macesqueness of the client (is that a word?).

Conclusion

I'm very happy to be stepping up my participation with the Client. I hope that this massive wall of text I've posted has helped you realize just HOW serious we are about delivering the best possible updater.

We will be continuing the free premium preview until we've gotten most of the things in this announcement out the way. We hope to have everything in this missive out to you guys in just a few short weeks.

And as always, please give me as much feedback as possible. Any and all constructive feedback on the things outlined in this announcement is most certainly welcomed.

It's a lot of work to do. We're making daily progress. And I'll keep you posted.


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  • Avatar of Phanx Phanx Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:09:17

    VoodoochildWOW: You could have answered all of your questions yourself by spending five minutes looking around the site at the numerous forum threads and news posts by Kaelten. No, the client does not and will never require you to pay in order to use it. The only benefit of a paid subscription is that updating multiple addons takes fewer mouse clicks.

  • Avatar of supersain supersain Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:16:17

    Just an idea: been looking for updated addons and seems like WoWInterface has most of the ace mods and other non ace addons updated. and its the actual updated version. iv downloaded a few updated ones from curse but they seem to be the old version still. or the new version doesnt d/l. Thinking mayb u ca team up with WoWinterface to get new versions as well.

    Again just a thought.

  • Avatar of VoodoochildWOW VoodoochildWOW Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:28:01

    Please forgive me if this has been answered or discussed already, but will the curse client be free to use or will it require a paid subscription to curse-gaming.com?

    I did have the client a while back, loved it but never realized that it didn't update my addons, just notified me about what needed to be updated. Don't know why I thought it was working in the background updating my addon without interactions. Honestly, that perception was actually FTW, LOL Im a sucka! When I realized that it simply just notified me of which addon had updates available when patch broke everything, and that I actually had to manually update them, I was totally bummed out.

    When the new client came out I thought it surely had the update feature; well I was right and wrong. Anywho no more QQ, I read somewhere that the curse client did something that other clients don't do which justified the required paid subscription.

    I totally disagree. Right now I am using somthing that everyone probably hates or so I've read, wowmatrix. But hey, it does what I need it to do and with flying colors. It sort of reminds me of the wowaceupdater but can do addons that are not ace dependant. One thing I wish it had was what I perceived the curse client to have had; the background updating with a simple notification of which addon it updated.

    I was just stating some questions and thoughts I had about the client here, and I apologize if I have offended anyone.

  • Avatar of Anyia3 Anyia3 Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:23:58

    Good stuff! The colour-coding sounds very useful.

    Currently my client has picked up two addons (out of three) that are working copies, and it'd be most useful to see whether it's actually treating them as working copies...

    I'm not sure if it's just the circumstances of the current client that are leading me to want this, but it'd be nice to have a button saying "Don't touch this add-on. In fact, don't even look at it again unless I tell you to." I'd like to use that on the add-ons that are working copies, and I'm certainly not game to try the "delete" button! It might be that this will become a non-issue after the listed feature are in, so not exactly a high priority item.

    I'd also like to second danielbarron's request for showing wow-version combatibility and/or an option to hide all out-of-date add-ons :)

  • Avatar of Squeeg Squeeg Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:03:38

    This post made me smile. =D

  • Avatar of blackrat blackrat Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:20:38

    For me the main problem is overwriting over addons:

    I usally delate the folder of the addon, and then copy/move the folder of the zip-extracted updated addon there.

    With curse the dates of the files in the folder are of the day of update, and not the original ones, making it diffucult to say, if it*'s an old version or not.

    No idea if you can solve this, but this would be a must requirement to use the Curse client.

    blackrat

  • Avatar of Kaelten Kaelten Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:57:34

    danielbarron: I'll make a note of the suggestion :)

    WowAce.com & CurseForge.com Adminstrator
    Developer of Ace3, OneBag3, and many other addons and libraries
    Project lead and Mac developer for the Curse Client

  • Avatar of ilovemrdoe ilovemrdoe Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:21:24

    Thanks for all the work you guys put into this, should be awesome when all these features to be up and running!

  • Avatar of mrwuss mrwuss Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:20:13

    And the light did shine down on the users of mods once again!

  • Avatar of danielbarron danielbarron Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:36:51

    Please make it say in the list when searching for addons which wow version it is for. Or an option to hide all out of date addons so I don't waste my time installing to find it does not work.

Table of contents

  1. 1 The State of the Client
  2. 2 The Big Issues
  3. 3 What we're going to do about it!
    1. 3.1 UI Changes
    2. 3.2 New Features
    3. 3.3 Changed Behaviors & Methods

Facts

Date created
26 Oct 2008
Last updated
28 Oct 2008

Author