The TOAD arrives!

I've been a busy little hacker and I'm pleased to announce the first (pre)release of my new addon management addon... TOAD, or the Task Oriented Addon Director! ^^



It should be hosted at curse shortly (the project is pending approval as I write this), but you can visit the TOAD curseforge project development page to get the prerelease:

Project page: http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/toad/
Download: http://static.curseforge.net/uploads/18/368/396/Toad-r4.zip Edit - 2009-07-08 09:40 - updated link to latest download

So without further ado, here's the same guff I wrote over there!

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TOAD, or Task Oriented Addon Director, is an addon manager that builds on top of ACP (Addon Control Panel) to provide easy, prompted, switching between task based addon sets by detecting where you are and what you are doing. This allows you to reduce the number of addons you have loaded at any one time, which decreases memory consumption and improves performance. It also has the capability to disable all but a minimal set of addons when you log out or disconnect to really reduce the amount of time it takes to get back in to the game world.

After you log in and while you are playing, the TOAD will try and detect what you are doing and suggest an addon set to be loaded. Currently supported addon tasks include PvE tasks such as questing, instancing (ie. 5-man dungeons), raiding, professional tasks such as crafting and gathering, PvP tasks in the game world, battlegrounds and arenas and there is also support provided to deal with bank alts and auction house mules.

At logout (or disconnect) time, TOAD will disable all but your configured set of minimal addons so that when you login to the game world, load times are drastically reduced. Ever DC in the middle of a boss encounter and have trouble getting back in? TOAD will give you the best chance to return to the battle ASAP! Additionally, define an Emergency Combat set and should TOAD detect that you have reentered the game world in combat, TOAD will make it quick and easy to get back on your feet and get back to the battle! Simple right click anywhere on the game world and the addon set will be loaded - and then you can sort out all those somewhat less essential addons straight after you've looted. ^^

TOAD requires you to set up addon sets in ACP, but uses the addon sets in an additive fashion. For example, you could set up an ACP addon set containing all the addons you always use for PvE and further sets containing additional addons that you only use during questing (QuestHelper for example? :)) or raiding (hello BigWigs and oRA2). Now if you find a brand new addon you want to use everywhere, just add it to one of the base sets and it will be available for all the related tasks (eg. Raiding -> PvE -> PvX -> Base -> Minimum -> System, while Battleground -> PvP -> PvX -> Base -> Minimum -> System).

TOAD is integrated with LDB in order to display the currently selected task and allow quick access to the task switching panel and has full command line support making it simple to write macros to perform task changes yourself.

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So, willing testers, go to it! Fire your questions at me! And I hope you like it just a little bit. :)

More instructions and improvements sure to follow!