When I grew up, we were “free range kids”.

Reminds me of the 2001 movie “Conspiracy”…

“The day is ok and the sun can be fun, but I live to see those rays slip away”

From “I Love the Night” - Blue Oyster Cult

To me, buttons and icons provide the visual cue that “clicking here does something”, without having to mouse over them to discover that they’re clickable.

It’s the unadorned text strings that aren’t as obvious.

Yea, I agree that Office 2003 was the pinnacle of Office UI design. And I’d go so far as to say that about Windows 2000.

Having controls in predictable shapes and locations really contributed to “ease of use”. One of my pet peeves is the more recent trend where clickable elements aren’t obviously so. Such as a string of text that one has to hover across and see the cursor change shape to know that it’s clickable.

As others have said, I think a significant part of why the UIs have changed since then is to accommodate touch screens and “webification”.

'Glad to see your posting. I thought I was just being curmudgeonly :)

I have the same question, mainly because it seems like the Plex interface is trying too hard to show stuff that’s not on my local server.

This was my first non-OS Microsoft purchase.

The most fun thing I did with it was to write a “war dialer” inspired by the 1983 movie “War Games”.

It had a “graphical” screen where one could enter a telephone area code, an exchange, and starting and ending numbers, then it would command the modem to dial each number in sequence.

It would log the call results as “no answer”, “busy”, “voice”, or “data”.

Good memories…