The other day I was going through my bookmarks and saved passwords in Firefox and deleting useless accounts for various websites that I felt I didn't need anymore. Among them was Curse.com where I had registered during Vanilla WoW when it still was named Curse Gaming. I had created that account to upload my (crappy when looked at now) user interface pack. Much later, sometime between TBC and WotLK that UI pack was wiped away with all the other packs for a reason I don't remember. I thought it was gone forever, but now I noticed that through some miracle, two screenshots had survived! Wow.

The first one is quite interesting. It's from my first or second raid, in Zul'Gurub. I was in that guild (The Perfect Gentlemen) for a really long time and I was even the guild master towards the end. Till this year when I quit, I still played with a couple of them. I think I have written something about the guild in my first entries that are longer than Lord of the Rings.

And please take a look at my level in the screenshot ;)

The second screenshot is far less interesting. It was obviously taken just to show off my UI pack and there's nothing interesting there. If you look closely, you see I had no clue how to play a hunter back then (keybindings? :P) nor did I have any clue this January either. Paladin, on the other hand, that I can handle.

Let's talk a moment about that UI itself. There was a time when my biggest dream in WoW was to release my own UI package and after a long time spent trying out everything, I finally liked it myself and someone asked me to upload it in the official User Interface forum. So I did, it was named Echo UI and I maintained it all the way till the end of TBC when I quit for the first time for a longer period.

Looking back, it's not pretty. It's the first public version in those screenshots and judging it now, it's mediocre at best. But I still like to think that it makes sense, at least the stuff is positioned instead of just putting stuff somewhere. I released four major versions during its existence and I learned a lot about what's unnecessary to show all the time and it got more minimalistic version by version. The best, of course, would have been the version five, which I made from the working pieces of version 4 after six months of not playing WoW, only to abandon it shortly after for another six months of Wowlessness and then worked on it for my own amusement for a couple of months and then I quit for the last (latest?) time. I never intended to release it again because that takes a lot of work, so it never got the finishing touch, but I played with it myself and I was happy.

During its existence, Echo UI was downloaded at least 5 000 times from Wowinterface.com and a bit less from Curse.com. Not huge numbers, but still, it makes me feel warm inside that that many people liked my work.

Work. Yup, I really didn't do that much, I just positioned stuff on the screen in a way that I liked (I wanted to say "in a neat way" but I guess many wouldn't agree with that). All the real work was done by the addon authors. Some awesome stuff they made, and even if I have quit WoW, the addon community is the one I check out regularly. Thanks to all those great people who wrote all that code.