The new UI is one of the features of DF that I’m most looking forward to. I’ve said it before when it was announced, and I’ll repeat it: My thanks go out to the devs for finally addressing this longstanding need to revamp the very dated UI (back to 2004).
I have nothing against add-ons, and believe that players should be free to use them as desired, however, I have become a fairly zealous default UI (zero add-ons) player, and I’m stoked for these changes. It’ll improve the quality of life for us baseline UI folks.
Of course, we all can probably think-up a list of suggestions and things which we’d like to see in addition. Some of the ideas I’ve already seen here are great.
One concern I’ve had is the unit frames. The first screenshot (which was released back at the DF announcement) shows new unit frames, but the beta as of now still has the old frames. I hope this just means the new frames aren’t finished yet and we’ll still see them updated!
I’d also like to see work continue to revamp UI textures for dialog boxes and buttons. For example, the new character screen buttons look great, but they clash with the older, lower quality buttons in-game. I’d love to see all of this updated to match the updated textures.
Also, it would be a missed opportunity to not expand the map pin functionality added in SL to allow for multiple pin locations, and also allow those locations to be set with coordinates. (Yes, I’m basically describing TomTom.) They’re tantalizingly close.
Finally, I’d like to see continued attention paid to boss encounter notifications. I’m not really looking for DBM-style timers exactly, but rather continued work to improve alerts for critical mechanics. I’d really like to see a point at which raid leaders don’t feel compelled to require add-ons like DBM or WeakAuras, because the UI will provide the basic information needed. (To be fair, they have improved greatly on this. SL has been the first expansion where I feel I can do AotC raiding without DBM alerts.)
Anyway, all this having been said, again I want to express my thanks to the UI team for undertaking this effort. Please don’t be discouraged by the long list of features people still have. I think folks are just excited that this is being looked at, and it’s opening the floodgates of ideas to reduce add-on dependency.