[raganwald]

In your defense, a lot of "elegant" GUI designs are like this: they lack affordances, so you have no idea that they can be manipulated. But once you learn them, they seem to make sense.

The common alternative, some sort of configuration wizard with 1,000 controls, seems worse. But only just.

[wheels]

In some cases it's just a little more thought -- like here if, for instance, the border of the menubar was highlighted as the mouse rolled over it, it would be pretty obvious, in my opinion.