Each week, WoW Insider’s Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond — your addons folder will never be the same.
Keeping your interface neat and tidy while still retaining a lot of your precious information can be a tough feat. Some poor souls never get away from a disaster UI, started and finished in sadness, shame, and wreckage. Do not fret, young ones. There are addons that can help you be neat and tidy without too much work on your part. I promise.
Glance was an addon that I first discovered while trolling through the comments on my various columns, as am I known to do. My readers are a steadfast bunch, always willing to show support for their man and recommend some great tools to players in need. Well, as it turns out, I am one of those players in need. A few weeks back, I got an email that asked me what was an easy way to get into LDB bars and addons, and I didn’t really have a great answer. The first thing that popped into my head was the concept — the bar addon works as a dock for other LDB plugins. It didn’t feel right explaining the whole thing in that way, so instead I went looking for an addon that resembled LDB but didn’t take the setup some LDBs require. That addon is Glance.
At a Glance
Glance works as an LDB bar-type, FuBar-esque information display that hangs out at the top of your screen. Everything is included without having to go out and find the separate modules and plugins. The downside to having everything included is that it’s not going to get added on to — the thing comes as is. That downside turns out to be an upside for many people who just want this specific set of features — and it’s a pretty robust feature set.
Modular addons are still my favorite type of addon because you can turn on and off pieces of the addon to save on CPU and memory usage, if you care about that sort of thing. One of the menus allows you to check or uncheck the modules you want to have active. The customization options allow you to scale the top bar, create mount and pet lists so you can summon a specific set of pets and mounts, auto-repair without a separate addon, and even view some party member stats as well.