10 Best Application UIs of 2008

[mouser]

Whether you agree with the choices or not, this is a nice short piece on trends in good user interface design.

Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
...
The winners of the first competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces are:

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-design.html

[Darwin]

Cool and crazy! Crazy may be the wrong word, but I've never heard of ANY of the apps mentioned 

[TheQwerty]

I saw this on Reddit earlier, but I still refuse to read it.
It's about UIs and there's only two pictures!
They mention these 10 Apps but don't link to a single one of them.

And then they get your hopes up, "302-page Application Design Annual report, with 206 screenshots, is available for download..." if you want to pay $98 for a PDF. 

Meh, I say! 

[Darwin]

Heh, heh, that got up my nose as well, TheQwerty 

[zridling]

Haven't heard of these either. Adobe Lightroom didn't make the cut? All I ask is that designers don't waste space on empty flair, i.e., I don't need icons the size of a credit card on my screen. Maybe that's why I like the sparse terrain of Gmail these days.