Curse

Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering a new addon created by myself: PetTracker!

The Addon

Ever found yourself wondering where to find a given pet? Which pets you have left to catch in some zone? What your enemies' abilities do, their cooldowns, rarity and statistics? Then we ought you to give PetTracker a try!

PetTracker is an add-on designed to help you keeping track of pets, in and out of combat. First, it displays the location of all pets in the world map, even if they are not obtained through pet battles. This makes it extremely helpful to understand where, when and how you can obtain a given pet. 

To help you to watch your progress in the current zone, it provides a tracker of which pets you have still to catch. It also displays the quality of any wild pet you battle.

In combat, it provides a full action bar of your enemy abilities. You can read their descriptions, and watch their cool downs and modifiers. Even better, it replaces the standard "switch pet" interface with a display of all the statistics and abilities of the pets currently in battle. Additionally, it can automatically determines which is the best of your pets agains the current foe. 

Gotta catch them all, right? 

Interview

I also took the time to answer some questions:

Why did you decide to create PetTracker?
As the World of Warcraft technical specialist for Curse, I need to be always on top of the new mods that are coming out. New expansions are especially busy seasons.
    So, as I looked for new pet battle mods for Mists of Pandaria launch, I've started to notice that, with very few exceptions, most were ridiculously simple. There was a need for more powerful and full-fledged addons.

In which situation do you find it most useful?
Always! Whether while leveling pets, doing the epic pet quest line, or trying to catch them all, I've always found PetTracker extremely helpful: in combat, knowing your enemy is extremely important. While searching for pets, having just a list of zones is not really enough.

Which were the hardest problems you had to face during development?
Doing an add-on in a completely new area is always a little more challenging. The blizzard lua API was never specially clean, and you will have to deduce everything by yourself. Not much of a problem, though. Doing the complete database of pet locations was also not easy, but it's not something I've never done before.
    The most challenging problem was to understand what features the users would like to get. Having ideas for new features can be quite challenging, because you have to put yourself in the place of the user.
    Usually, when I look back after having added a feature, the idea appears to be quite simple, but I know it was not simple to get there. For PetTracker, I've iterated through many ideas, most never seen the light of the day, and the ones you see now were only chosen almost before launch. Many, many more features are still in the hover waiting to be born.

Could you tell us about any other mods you are working on, or have planned for the future?
I don't have any new mod planned for the moment, as I have plenty to manage already. Making add-ons is only half the way, maintaining them is actually the hardest work.
     Right now, I believe I'm mostly known for my work on Bagnon and OmniCC. Those have still some extremely rare issues to fix, introduced by MoP. And there are always many new features users would like to see.
    There are other mods I intent to spend some time with, such as Scrap, Blitz and Cornucopia. But, before, there are still many new features I'm working on for PetTracker. Stay tuned!