John Gruber doesn’t write full length pieces as often as he used to, but this one is good. It is mostly a piece on how the newly released Twitter for Mac has bucked traditional User Interface concepts/trends on OS X and kinda done it’s own thing:

There’s a conservative/liberal sort of fork in UI design, in the sense of traditional/non-traditional. The conservatives see non-standard custom UI elements as wrong. Liberals see an app built using nothing other than standard system UI elements as boring, old-fashioned, stodgy.

It took me a long time to learn about sticking to standards when it comes to design. The irony is that now that I have, we are coming to the point where the trend is going the other way.

I agree with Gruber that there is probably nothing to fear, but having seen some of the apps in the Mac App Store, I don’t think we are there yet.