Okay, my new inventory concept (presented in the last entry) starts to take some shape. The whole positioning- and drag&drop-system is implemented and I'm currently experimenting with the container frames. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to do - I can't even toggle the frame! I have to open it via command! The screenshot is not really a fast and useful storing system, it's more of eye-candy to demonstrate the current features. You can expect the buttons to be a lot more chaotic positioned in their daily use, I don't suspect people to form circles with every new item they get ... but who knows.

I thought about a new inventory frame in World of Warcraft. My dream always was to create fluid item icons which can be dragged and scale as one likes, because it seems to be the best solution for a minimalistic, yet elegant design. You could basically group icons into categories and select multiple ones to do the same action on all of them (e.g. mailing or selling). Icons which are placed on top of each other would slide away in all directions if you mouse-over them to provide access to single ones.

The reason for this is simple: I'm not really satisfied with the normal design principles of the different inventory addons (even my own cargBags!). You either have a large all-in-one frame which holds lots of icons in fixed rows, so that it is hard to find a single item - or you have lots of frames categorizing the items into Consumables, Weapons, Quest items ... but you would need tons of different categories to find an item fast. My concept could combine the best of both worlds: You group the items by yourself, so you can remember where they are! The scalability makes it also possible to prioritize items: You can make important ones bigger and less important ones smaller.

I decided to grab the Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet of my brother and do my third try at speed painting. This picture was meant as an exercise on detailed mountain drawing and some lightning experimentations. I'm not really sure if I'll expand on this hobby, because as almost everything it needs loads of practice - which of course needs even more patience. Well, at least drawing was relaxing.

WoW Lua: Positioning text in a frame

A small sketch I did for someone to show the principle of anchoring text frames correctly in the World of Warcraft API.