In the first of a new weekly column, Addon Corner, I thought I’d review two popular messenging addons.
Both Cellular and WoW Instant Messenger (or WIM) are popular addons. They both provide a more familiar way to deal with private messages, providing an interface that mimics popular instant messenger applications like Yahoo! Instant Messenger or Windows Live Messenger.
Getting private messages ingame without any addons can sometimes be frustrating, especially if you, for example, play an “in-demand” class like a priest, warrior or other tanking class. Seeing a mass of pink messages scroll up and out of the regular chat frame while remembering which of the 10 people who just messaged you wanted a tank for Dire Maul can be annoying.
Both these addons simplify that by providing dedicated frames for each “conversation”, just like a regular IM application.
Lets look at Cellular first.
Cellular is an Ace2 addon, Ace2 is a set of libraries for addons to use to simplify the creation process, the added benefit of this is if you use other Ace2 addons they share the same libraries so save on memory usage.
Because of that Cellular is a fairly lightweight addon, it keeps the lightweight feel in it’s interface design too. The chat frame design is simple and plain but fully functional with buttons down the left hand side for doing common actions, such as a /who query, adding as a friend, adding to your ignore-list and inviting to your party. Some buttons such as the End Conversation button require a Shift-Click which acts as a confirmation method.
Cellular also has basic message history and busy message functionality.
Onto WoW Instant Messenger.
WIM has a much more polished look and feel than Cellular using a more traditional look for it’s message windows. They include more information straight away including the class icon, guild, level, race and class of the person right along the top of the dialog.
It also includes buttons for common tasks along the right and requires a Shift-Click to end a conversation.
WIM is insanely customisable and allows for user-written plugins to perform other tasks (included in the base package is a spam-filter plugin). It also has the abilty to have conversations open in multiple tabs rather than seperate windows.
The other thing WIM does that Cellular does not is keep track of current conversations, it adds both a minimap icon as well as a FuBar and Titan Panel icon that gives access to currently minimised message windows.
Both addons are good at what they do, Cellular is the more minimalist, lightweight addon and WIM is the more versatile, feature-packed addon.
No matter which of these two addons you choose to use, they’ll make dealing with people that little bit less frustrating.
