A great article today from Austin and Luis at MacTHEME: “The World of Candybar“.

It’s a combination review of CandyBar and interview with Cabel Sasser from Panic and Gadeon Maheux from Icon Factory:

MacThemes: Additionally, what’s your favorite new bit of “eye candy” ?

Ged: Simply switching from one collection to another. The Core Animation cross-fade never gets old. I find myself just mousing around inside the program to see one icon fade into the other. It’s like watching a cheap version of those CGI “morphs”. Doing an “Arrange by…” and watching how the collection animates is neat too. For something fun, try arranging your entire icon library in different ways and sit back and watch the show.

[…]

MacThemes: I’ve long believed Panic applications prove the theory that Mac applications are better-designed (from a UI perspective) than Windows apps; what drives you to develop for the Mac only?

Cabel: It’s not even something we question or think about — it was just a no brainer. The innovation, the elegance, the lack of focus testing, the general feeling that people care about the end product, it makes us want to keep doing what we do. It’s a feedback loop of inspiration.

It’s almost impossible to feel passion about Windows as a platform. Probably like many of your readers, when I use software or applications, my brain can’t help but subconsciously notice an infinite stream of little things that are weird or out of place or questionably designed that I want to fix. When I try to use Windows, this internal alarm is literally constantly firing. Every window, every dialog, every workflow, my brain trips up on 1 or 5 or 15 things that are hard to comprehend. I can barely even use Vista without wanting to wrap it up, glaze it with a delicious marinade, cook it in an oven, garnish it with a sprig of mint, and toss it out the god-forsaken window.

(And as a general warning, once you tune your brain to the UI channel, you become hopeless. I had to stop the clerk at Border’s the other day to let me take a closer look at their internal book lookup application — it had some of the best/worst icons I’ve ever seen, like an “Add New” button that was a small crane lifting a shipping container and an even-worse rendition of the always-terrible “Filter” icon that involved a tiny coffee maker.)

Plus, I seem to be a fan of long interviews and reviews lately.