WowAce

What is the enhancement in mind?

A way to search for the event that is saying "this message I want to delete" -- I don't know what event is causing it to say this, but I want to change it, so I need a search mechanism.

How should it look and feel?

1) Type in some of the speech in the search box
2) select TYPE of Event = "Events containing a speech that contains [what I typed in the search box]"
3) The list box item should dynamically fill in [what I typed in the search box] with what i actually typed

Please provide any additional information below.

It would be nice if I could easily jump to, or at least identify, random speech N where this substring was found.

I also want to make sure read-only if that's where the search match was found.

Current version 3.2.2.12 bloggish commenting:

This feature idea was inspired by thinking about enhancements I could make to help a confused end-user who was new to SpeakinSpell and could not figure out how to stop it from saying "Well, well, well... It looks like <target> has suffered an 1D10T failure..." possibly because it was filed under the unintuitive event "When I type: /ss macro rez" as opposed to the actual spell "When I cast: Redemption" or whatever class he was.

While there are guides in place to help lead you from "When I cast: Redemption" to "When I type: /ss macro rez" where you can find "Well, well, well... It looks like <target> has suffered an 1D10T failure..." it's still challenging to find it in the list of 64 speeches. So even putting aside the usage issues surrounding "/ss macro stuff" being non-obvious, I still want a way to search the speeches for a fragment of text.

I ran into the same issue searching for a mount macro that I didn't like.

What I did for mounts was: 1) type in "mount" in the search. 2) methodically go through each event that matched the search, in order so I wouldn't lose my place. 3) for each event, go down to the speech list, and read every speech. Delete the ones I don't like, and mark read-only on the ones that I like. I did this for "/ss macro other mount category" calls too if I was satisfied the sub-group was a good choice. 4) I ended up deleting quite a few, and my current mount settings are matured compared to the defaults that I packed in 3.2.2.12. I'm not 100% satisfied yet though because of the RNG issues so I'm holding off on updating the DefaultSpeeches file for mounts until I add a few more features to clean up how it works to suit my tastes.

That took a long time and yielded a better overall result in the end, but I really just wanted to QUICKLY find the 1 speech I didn't like, that I had just seen.

IDEA: a goto button that takes you to the last speech announced.

Adding "/ss macro rez" in the defaults was really a case that I was tired of maintaining 5 groups of the same exact speech list for 5 different rez spells (druids have 2) and Dire Lemming sent me a bunch of new ones that were good - and this was one of them, thanks a lot DL LOL.

Seriously though I only took DL's rez speeches that I liked, and I liked that one! It's obvious when you've been rezzing a raid and that's the 10th time you spammed a different macro, everybody sees it's obvious you're running an addon for that... I don't think anybody would think that guy's a jerk for saying the idiot failure comment like he was afraid of.

But the question got me off on this thinking about the general usability and "out of the box" experience.

I trust an interested user to figure it out in 3.2.2.12. I think it's still fine, it's not so arcane that my long post on the curse.com comments page today was necessarily warranted. Half the words and he probably would have been able to figure it out fine. And there are about 1k total users now from what i can tell of the max download count of any one version, so I think the majority of people figure it out fine.

But his experience is a PERFECT example to serve as a test case for the out of the box experience because this new user had a major buzz-kill experience: SS was making him say something "out of the box" that he felt made him look like a jerk. That in itself is something I think is unavoidable as a matter of taste, but worse than that: he couldn't FIND the speech in order to delete it.

KEY POINT: I pride SS on its usability and wealth of options - NOT on its default content for speeches and configuration - so it doesn't bother me that he didn't like the speech or that particular event trigger or the whisper option or anything specific about the content of what it made him say, when, and why ... But I expect to turn around and say it's OBVIOUS how to go into the options, EASILY FIND this behavior you didn't like, and change it to suit your tastes.

It's crushing that this guy said he looked for 30 minutes and couldn't find it... that's probably an exaggeration, but even so, he felt like he really searched for a long time, which is a clear assessment that it's not intuitive enough ... it was hard to FIND something.

That just screams "add a search feature"

It also ties into the "Lite Mode" kinds of thinking I've had about hiding advanced controls... to make it easier to find what you're looking for.

It ties into making the Speech List Group in the GUI more visible, bringing it to the front or the top so you see that first, assuming it's more likely you want to edit the speeches than adjust the coolown, frequency, or channels. But in a way it's easier to scroll to the bottom because the MOST common usage seems to be adding a new speech to an existing event.

It ties into making shared speech lists more visible in the speech list for the parent event. Part of why this guy couldn't find the offending speech was because it was an indirect call from When I Cast Redemption through /ss macro rez to reach the speech. As a new user who isn't aware of the advanced feature to use "/ss macro something" this may look like some kind of arcana, like the name of this event When I Cast Redemption, instead of a list of speeches... and what's this "edit macro event" button do? And do I have to set up all my spells this way? Why doesn't it just have the list of speeches here.

After a transition to "/ss group rez" those groups should get copied in-line in the defaults automatically, or be shown expanded automatically. I like the copy idea for simplicity, but I think the "show expanded" is better data management especially considering druids have 2 rez spells that share the speech list, and all the mount speech lists overlap in a nice way IMO that is more maintainable if it stays as separate groups rather than getting copied/imported by default "out of the box" ... then if you think of one good new mount spell you have to copy it to all 85 mount summoning spells? no, that's no good. It should show expanded rather than copy/import.

It goes beyond new users too. After a long time if I decide I want to change up a few of my mount macros, maybe even revamp how they're grouped, it's hard to find them, navigate them, and change them in 3.2.2.10, and I'd like it to be better. Searching the speech list would go a long way to improving that.

Even if I can search for part of a speech that I want to change, to find which "/ss macro list" it's in, I also want to find where that macro is called out, and that's an issue for the new user too.

Even if he could search for the offending speech and easily delete it, he'd see it's under the event "When I type: /ss macro rez" ... what is making it do that? I didn't type "/ss macro rez" ... It would probably look like some voodoo magic, and it's not obvious that other events are set up to trigger "/ss macro rez" as a "random speech." A transition to /ss group will help with that especially if it's shown expanded by default.

Even understanding how that's set up, I still need a way to search for where this is used, what event is making it call out "/ss macro rez" ... oh, I see something .... I can search for "/ss macro rez" as a fragment of a speech, and that'll show me where that's called out. But if I search for "/ss macro mount" it's also going to match as a substring of "/ss macro mount flying" and that's not necessarily what I'm looking for... maybe I do want all of them, but maybe not.

Getting back to the new user again, he doesn't necessarily understand that some events are set up to trigger other /ss macro events, in order to realize that's how to search. So some auto-searching button is called for "search for where this macro is used" which could leverage the features in a power-user way as I described, and then the user probably goes "ohhhh" and sees how that works pretty obviously. Or again, use a different shared speech group system, show it expanded by default, and hide the fact that it's triggered via command lines stored in the data.

That's enough rambling and thinking it over... I wanna see how many arena points I got today LOL

(batch update) This ticket could benefit from Ticket 103: [Click Here] to do something.

I'm re-assigning all my tickets to Duerma

Unassigning tickets that are not actively being worked on