AddOns in Review: CowTip 2.0 (and DogTag)

Author’s note: I have quit playing World of Warcraft before patch 3.0.5. Content in this article is unlikely to be relevant anymore and will not be updated.
This time we’re reviewing an add-on which isn’t really critical in most of the common sense of the word – Tooltip modifiers are mainly fit into a category of little tools which improve both visual aspects of the game and are meant to provide you a supplemental layer than what comes out of the box.Until a couple of weeks ago I was an user of the venerable TinyTip, which had been part of my set for at least a year or so. When CKKnight migrated his add-ons to the Rock framework, it was time to see where I could leverage some more components beyond just FuBar, PitBull and Parrot.

Enter CowTip, not necessarily CKK’s most wide-spread add-on, but it definitely has a lot of good things going for it.

The essentials: CowTip is a Tooltip Enhancer, replacing the default UI’s to quite some advantage. The biggest asset IMO is that it leverages not the Rock Framework but a library you are definitely using if you’re having PitBull: DogTag, a very handy collection of functions which allow you to specify a wealth of in-game information to be displayed by a couple of simple shortcut names enclosed in brackets.

Sounds confusing? Let me give you an example. The player unitframe displays your name. To do that, there are a couple of ways, and some of the UnitFrames allow you to tweak the way it is displayed. Some don’t at all, and in some cases, it’s quite complex to pull off.

The DogTag library however enables you to display it simply by writing [Name] into an addon using that library. Like PitBull for instance. Want to also have it show the Realm of a player in BG? No problem. [NameRealm] is what you’re after. Very simple stuff actually, and it comes with a lot of room for customization. And CowTip is one of those utilities taking full advantage of DogTag.

The Tooltip to the left for instance shows a player from the opposing faction, out of combat. All the information displayed is tied to a DogTag tag. Notice also the healthbar on top and the manabar at the bottom – stuff TinyTip did as well for that matter. Slightly less visible because of my settings (OK, it’s actually still the stock out of the box one), the background of the tooltip is actually dark reddish, indicating a hostile target. Obviously, you will be able to change the colour and transparency of the background for each type of target – hostile player, allied player, hostile, neutral and alliend NPCs, world objects, each with their own possible colour combination.To the right is the in-combat tooltip for an NPC. Note, for that matter, than in the meantime I had customized the default setting so that the race actually gets coloured in the hostility colour. Nice and handy, it’s easier to me than spending ages trying to find the exact type of background colour which suits me.

The configuration is done through RockConfig, which, due to the amount of options, is all right – for the people nostalgic about pulldown menus (which will eventually be ported to Rock), still no cigar but I think a full config GUI is best when you start to have many options to consider.

The final screenshot here displays the tooltip definition window, with the legends on the left side and the various corresponding DogTags on the right side.

In summary, if you are looking for a replacement for the default game tooltips, CowTip does the job very nicely. As is usually the case with this author, the Out-of-the-box experience is very well done, the standard default configuration providing a nice-looking and very useable setup from the get-go. And if or when you need to tweak, you have the full power of the DogTag library at your disposal to make your tooltips display exactly the information you want.