Fancy Windows, &c.

Lately, inspired by John Gruber‘s recent assertions that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are no longer relevant (a good summary can be found here), the new, fancier widgets made by various Cocoa developers have come into the spotlight. Daniel Jalkut, a Very Cool Guy, developed a bunch of very nifty widgets while revamping the interface for his unbelievably cool application FlexTime, and was so kind as to blog about his thought process while doing it. His blog entry pointed me to Matt Gemmell‘s enormous stack of custom-made widgets, replete with shiny screenshots. My interest piqued, I fired up Google and found Sean Patrick O’Brien’s iLifeControls framework, a class-dumped version of Disco‘s Smoke framework, Toxic Software’s Toxic Progress Indicator and TXTableView, Chad Weider’s badging and gradient code, Blake Seely’s BSRoundedBox, Andy Matuschak’s Polished Metal buttons, AMViewAnimation, and OpenHUD framework, Andreas M.’s jaw-dropping amount of custom widgets, Erling Ellingsen’s CGSWindowWarp exposé, John Pannell’s PSMTabBarControls, Uli’s freakin’ plethora of awesome doodads, Rainer Brockerhoff’s RBSplitView, and Ankur Kothari’s CoreGraphics framework.

Wow.