In icon-related news, the latest Skype beta, with address book integration and other goodies, has ditched gloss in its (also 512 pixel) icon. A welcome change, in my opinion, although they could have actually made resources for 128 pixels; the downscaled version looks a bit weird.

Get the new beta here.

The revamped icon manager, now the old Pixadex and Candybar-in-one! I helped Cabel and the Panic dudes test this a bit, and it’s truly beyond what I could have imagined in an icon application. It’s simply a must.

Expect a new mystery freeware set in December with a custom dock to make full use of this gorgeous app! You can download the trial and explore its features over at Panic.

From the same source as the stack drawers, I found that a new little application had been released that turns Leopard into the premiere point release of OS X when it comes to desktop customization. Susumu Yoshida, a talented icon designer, released his very elaborate set of brightly colored and nicely textured stack drawers, which I tested during the last week and thoroughly enjoyed. See this desktop screenshot;

Click for original and fullsize at Flickr.

I found that a software company, CocoaMug, has put together a tool to customize every aspect of your dock. It’s called Palette, and costs a mere $6.90 for a full license. It doesn’t just allow you to choose a color for the background of your 3D dock, but it also allows you to set these beautiful ‘drawer’ icons for individual stacks – making using stack drawers as simple as drag and drop. Click here for an impressive video demo on Susumu’s blog. Thanks for sharing, Susumu!

Supermegaultragroovy released the upgraded Fuzzmeasure today, a very powerful application for recording, live sound and acoustics professionals. The new icon was made by yours truly, and I will blog about the making of this icon soon – it was an interesting tour of concepts.

For now, check out the free trial and website.

Fellow designer Fernando Lins pointed out this link to a website that grabbed my attention.

Naked Light, as previewed, promises to be a fully resolution-independent image editor with all the powerful features a designer might need. I won’t be making my judgement until I have actually used the application (the public beta will be due in a day and 10 hours, at the moment of writing) but it seems promising, going from the website;

Naked light throws away antiquated concepts like pixels; layers; 8-bit color; and destructive, non-re-editable filters and operations. Instead, compositions in Naked light represent a sort of Platonic ideal—with infinite resolution, an astounding 590 quintillion colors, and perpetually re-editable nodes.

Hopefully, this will help alleviate the high hopes users had for a Photoshop replacement in Pixelmator, which apparently failed to deliver.