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Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering QuestPointer, by Kemayo.

The Addon

Leveling your characters up to 90? Questing with your new monk alt? Then, if you want to save precious time, you might want to take a look at QuestPointers!

Long ago (not that much), Blizzard added the ability to display quest objective locations on the world map. While extremely useful, sometimes it can be hard to tell whether you are at the correct location. Often, I find myself opening and closing the world map over and over again.

QuestPointers solves this problem doing one simple thing: it displays the quests' objectives at the minimap. Out of range objectives will be faded and displayed on the corner of the minimap, much alike the arrows.

Additionally, QuestPointers has the option to display only objectives for quests you're watching.

Interview

We also had the opportunity to have a chat with the add-on's author, Kemayo:

Why did you decide to create QuestPointer?
I'd been using TourGuide , which pointed you on a relatively optimal path through zones for leveling. However, it relied on someone painstakingly building a leveling guide, and keeping it updated for patch changes. Then Blizzard added the objective tracking to the zone map, and it occurred to me that since Blizzard is pretty good at pointing you to the next quest hub, a quick addon to show on your minimap where those objectives are would replace about 95% of TourGuide's functionality for me.
    After I'd done that, I found out how ridiculously useful it is to have the objective showing in your minimap once you're close to it, drawing you right in to some fairly hidden things. But that was just a bonus.

How hard was to calculate the pointers positions on the minimap?
For me it was really easy, because I just used the library Astrolabe (by Esamynn), whose whole purpose is managing displaying icons on the minimap. Astrolabe is a lot more complicated than everything else in my addon.
     The math behind "I'm at x,y, and a waypoint is at X,Y, what's the angle?" is simple enough, but Astrolabe handles a lot of things which complicate that basic question: "when should a point move off the edge of the minimap, at various zoom levels?", "what if addons have changed the shape of the minimap?", "how should a point on a different floor of the current zone be handled?", etc.
It makes my life easier knowing that someone else already thought about these things.

Could you tell us about any other mods you are working on?
Funnily enough, I can!
• SilverDragon is a rare mob tracker. It's like NPCScan, but does have the distinction of having been around longer. :P
• BankStack sorts your bags and bank, and moves/stacks things between them. It can do things like throw everything that could possibly fit from your bags into an Engineering bag in your bank.
• BetterQuest is a quest tracker replacement. It also does a bunch of other things, like playing sounds for quest/objective completion, autotracking quests, telling you about your party's quests, etc.
• DropTheCheapestThing is a junk dropper/seller.
There's others, but those are the ones I'm really paying attention to nowadays.

Do you have any advice for other add-on developers?
Make your first addon with one of the frameworks (Ace, Dongle), because it's easier to learn Lua and the WoW API if you've got some structure provided for you. Make your next one without any frameworks at all, so you can understand what the frameworks were doing for you. After that... do whatever you prefer.
    Show up on IRC. There's #wowace and #wowuidev on Freenode, which are good places to ask questions and keep up to date with WoW API news.

Thank you to Kemayo for answering our questions and developing this add-on.