Matt Gemmell, legendary coder of Mac OS X source code and programming fame, has posted an expansive review of Icon Resource on his blog.

I genuinely feel like I learned a lot about what was previously something of a black art to me, and I couldn’t help but come away feeling enthusiastic about the prospect of creating some of my own icons for future software projects – or just for fun.

Check it out here if you’re interested!

I have been noticing a disturbing trend in custom interface design of third party applications for Mac OS X. As it is no longer an exception for software developers to build interface elements that are entirely unique to their application, the threshold for customizing other, system-standard interface elements is also lowered significantly. The ghastly trend I am about to describe is in existence due to this lowered threshold. In fact, I think this particular deviation off the beaten interface path would have been far more frowned upon a few years ago, when Mac interface designers were more conservative in using custom UI elements in general, and Apple disapproved of it more fiercely. Today, however, it won’t even stand in the way of scoring a design award runner-up, as my examples will go to prove.

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If you’re eager to hear a bit more about my work, my person, and the whole story with Apple, I recommend you listen to Pomcast’s latest English episode, where I and StuFF mc discuss Apple, graphical user interface design and a bunch of other things.

Uli Kusterer remarks how this week was full of visual UI goodness; from the blog post by Sean Patrick about designing and implementing resolution-independent Leopard-style buttons in Mac OS X, to the release of Icon Resource (featuring Alastair’s interesting thoughts on the videos in the package) and a podcast about making custom views.

I also found John Gruber’s ‘Firefox vs. Safari’ post interesting, being in my Latitude browser state of mind, as he prefers Safari over Firefox for its, yes, superior UI. I’ve complained about this before on the blog, and it seems I am not the only one.

Also, talking about interface design and resolution-independence, I hope you have not missed the video of Cabel Sasser’s C4[1] talk – he posted the slides and a Photoshop file used in the presentation on his blog this week. Be sure to view the video if you haven’t seen it yet!