Playing with Addons - Trinity Bars

I've been experimenting with a new actionbar addon.

First, I should explain that I play WoW with a Nostromo N52. I have the two top rows of buttons assigned to 1,2,3,4,5 and 6,7,8,9,0. The third row is assigned to Alt, Shift, Tab, and Q(jump!) The thumb button is set to auto-run, and the hat (gamepad) it set to move forward, move backward, strafe left and strafe right. I also use Mouse Look Lock so that my mouse is always in control of my camera, unless I hold down the thumb button on the mouse to bring up my cursor.

So, I had previously been using Bartender3, which is an Ace2 addon. I had used it to create a buttonbar near the center of my screen that has 5 buttons across in 2 rows to emulate the top 10 buttons on the Nostromo. I had it configured so that when I hold down Alt or Shift, the icons would automatically change to reflect buttons that are available while holding down Alt or Shift. This makes for a VERY asthetically pleasing visual cue for my nostromo hotkeys.

Well, Bartender3 has a critical bug. Every now and then, without warning, and without any specific input, the default (no alt or shift held down) bar decides to switch to another hotbar. My usual kill and heal buttons are suddenly totally unavailable, and I find myself crippled.

This bug is a problem when exploring solo, a BIG problem when I'm grouped, and a CRITICAL WIPE issue when I'm in a raid tanking something. It's simply not acceptable.

I've never been able to figure out a way to fix the problem while in game. I've even tried to do a "/console reloadui" and that doesn't work. The only way to fix it is to log out of the character to the character screen, and log back in. This is not acceptable during a raid, or almost any time, really.

So, I decided to try to find a new addon. The one I'm using now is Trinity Bars. For now, I think it's excellent. I've been able to perfectly replicate the setup from Bartender3, including the visual shifting of buttons when I hold down the alt and shift keys.

An extra bonus in Trinity is the fact that EACH button can be configured to have a macro script embedded on it, with a text limit of 1023 characters. When a button is configured this way, it doesn't consume an actual "macro" from the game's built in macro system, which is GREAT, because I've run out of room for any more macros on almost ALL of my characters!

As a bonus, if you embed a macro on one of Trinity's buttons, you can still move them around by dragging and dropping them, as if they were spells! This one feature causes me to give this addon a MASSIVE thumb's up, even if I happen to find some other huge bug.

The only problem I've had so far with Trinity is that occasionally, I find myself having to re-keymap certain buttons. I'm not certain why this happens, but I usually notice it immediately on login - the problem doesn't occur randomly during combat like the Bartender3 problem.

The addon doesn't appear to have been updated in a little while, but the author does appear to be working on a new version that will hopefully be released in time for the 3.0 patch in a week or so. We'll see how it goes!