Hello again!
It’s been a while since I’ve written about WowiArmory, but I was mentioned on WowInsider again today, and as such I’m getting a large surge of people who are interested in WowiArmory. Additionally, I’m getting many questions that I would like to address here.
First of all, if you are new, then I am still accepting testers! Send me an e-mail via the contact page and let me know that you’re interested, and any other information you may think is relevant. I’ll add you to the mailing list and send you an e-mail with further instructions.
Second, I have contacted Rudi from rudi.blog, and the creator of Warcraft Characters, to see if he would be interested in working together in a collaborative effort to make an application that fully utilizies his intuitive and beautiful UI, and includes all the features that are currently in (and were planned for) WowiArmory. He has expressed interest in this, and hopefully I’ll have an update soon with more information. The first item that’s planned to be integrated is full support for character-specific items (full-color item stats with gemmings and enchants!).
Expect to see most (if not all) of the following features:
All this within a nice, compact, and easy-to-use interface on your iPhone or iPod touch. If you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions, please let me know in a comment! I’d love to hear your ideas and what you think.
Matticus from World of Matticus recently made a post where he confessed to a few mistakes (and evil deeds) that he has done in the past. He mentiones, for example, faking a disconnect by quitting Vent and stopping casting spells while he was the bomb on Astromancer Solarian, just because he was in the mood that day to watch everyone go flying. At the end of his post, he asked a simple question,
What’s the most colossal mistake you’ve ever made that you’re willing to admit to?
As soon as I read that question, one instance instantly popped into my mind. This story took place back in March, and my guild had finally reached 5/6 on SSC, and decided to start venturing into TK. We had already downed Void Reaver and Solarian before (putting us at 2/4), but we wanted to finally give A’lar a shot. My raid leader (and my guild leader) specifically requested I be there, as I had demonstrated by ability for being a good add courier the previous raid. I had given him my word. Additionally, I was a little bit behind the rest of the group in terms of gear, as I had been carried to the point where I was. Because of this, I needed as much DKP as I could possibly get.
Unfortunately, I had also just gotten a girlfriend, and it was one whom I don’t see very often. She called the day before the raid and told me she specifically freed up time the next day (the day of the raid) so she could come and see me. You can probably already see the problem I faced. You probably see two options here;
I, however, saw a third option. I spent most of the afternoon setting up WoW on my laptop, and arranging all my add-ons. The evening arrived, and my girlfriend showed up at my door. We went down to my basement, so we could have some privacy (and play with the Wii, which she was a huge fan of). Raid time drew near, and I opened up my laptop and logged in to WoW. Wanting to get the DKP for the night, I did something that was highly discouraged; I joined the raid group even though I wasn’t planning on raiding that night.
However, lady luck was not with me this night, and we were low on tanks, and my raid leader requested I go as our first off tank. I’ll spare you the agony of the whole situation, but I’ll highlight a few more interesting moments.
We wiped once on the boss due to our new warrior add tank having line of sight issues. The raid leader called for a 10 minute recess so we can all recollect ourselves. He took me into a private channel, and told me that he knew that I wasn’t giving it my all, and he had noticed I was in my kitty gear all along. He asked me if I wanted to stay in the raid and actually try, or take the night off (he was generous enough to offer me the night off without giving me a DKP penalty for leaving unannounced). I apologized to my girlfriend, ran to get a mouse (I was on my laptop, remember?), and turned on my music. Surprisingly, this is the one fight where I truly proved myself to the raid leader, and the rest of the guild. We all remember it clearly, because of one little thing that happened.
The way my guild does A’lar is to have two tanks leap frogging A’lar from platform to platform. We then have an add courier (my job) that grabs adds as they appear, and brings them to a fourth and final tank who’s sitting on the bottom floor “collecting” all the adds from the courier. I was already fairly well known from our last attempt a few nights ago, as I was doing my job perfectly, picking up the adds exactly when I needed to, and delivering them successfully each time. I was using my abilities intelligently, and I was positioning myself correctly.
However, it was getting late, and we were all a bit tired. Without realizing it, one of our main tanks (the guild/raid leader!) accidentally positioned himself on the platform in a way that he was out of site of the healers. He quickly died. I was nearby getting ready to pick up the add and noticed him fall. I used Feral Charge to get to the boss as quickly as I could, and positioned myself on the edge so the healers could get me. I tanked Al’ar right there the whole time, and the second he flew away, I threw a battle rez (without waiting for a proper brez request from the raid leader) to the fallen tank. I threw a healing touch on him, as well as a quick Mark of the Wild. I then shifted into bear and properly transported the add to our add collector. The tank was in position and ready to take on A’lar the next time his turn came around. That was the first time we downed A’lar.
Just goes to show you, you can completely mess up and let your raid down, and still end up on top. I wouldn’t recommend it though, ;)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I’ve been hard at work since my last posting. Aside from real life responsibilites (I’m working full time during the summer), I’ve been working to try and make iArmory the best tool it can possible be. For those who aren’t subscribed to my mailing list, you’ve probably missed a few important announcements.
iArmory has been renamed to WowiArmory due to issues I won’t go into at this time.
I would like to set up an actual website for WowiArmory which will contain information about the web app, and include screenshots and a way to contact me and report bugs. There are two reasons I mention this. First of all, most of my skills lie in the aspect of web development, rather than web design. If any of you are good at designing websites, I would love to have your help in designing the new WowiArmory website, just let me know! Second, I would like the website to include user testimonials from testers such as yourself. If you have something to say about WowiArmory and would like to be featured on the website, please send me an e-mail and let me know! The more replies I get, the better.
Many of you have been asking if I’m going to release the source code of WowiArmory, so that you may learn from it and create your own applications based on it. I’m both surprised and flattered by the great reaction I’ve gotten of this nature, and as such have decided to do three major things. First of all, I’m working on creating an API that will simplify the communication with WoW Armory to something as simple as getCharData(”NAME”, “REALM”); getStat(”Strength”);. The API will do all the caching, XML handling, and data parsing for you. The second major thing I’m doing is porting WowiArmory so that it uses this API for all of its caching and information gathering. Finally, I’m going to release the source code to both the API and to WowiArmory, for you all to learn from and develop off of. If you are a PHP developer and would like to help me test it out or give me feedback, or assist me in the project, please do let me know in a new e-mail.
A large majority of you have asked if I was planning on making WowiArmory into a full-fledged application on the official AppStore. To be honest, I would love to! It would open up many possibilities for the application, including the ability to save character data locally, and the ability to mark characters as ‘favorites’. I could even build in a tool for comparing two characters on a stat-by-stat basis! It would also parse the XML data locally, meaning that you will never be troubled because too many people are trying to use WowiArmory at the same time (so the official armory won’t lock WowiArmory out, and as such you won’t be stuck in a queue). If you’re an Xcode developer and can develop applications for the iPhone (or know someone who is/can), please do let me know, I’d be very interested in working with you!
If you’d like to be informed via e-mail whenever an update is made to WowiArmory, please send me an e-mail via the contact page of this blog. Remember that you can also keep track of updates to WowiArmory by subscribing to my blog, or following me on Twitter.
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