Erik Barzeski has some good criticism of OmniGraffle 3 and its icons. The new palettes look cool, and I was never really a fan of the old Interface Builder–style ones. I think I want something more context-sensitive.

Fair enough--I see what you're saying about the distinction between what should be in a palette and what should be in a separate window. Now that I think about it, Omni would probably be well-advised to start thinking in that direction.

I guess the only other thing that I would say is that what really impressed me (again, as a Cocoa developer) was the Omni palette as a cool custom UI widget. I still stand by my feeling that Omni has "evolved" the palette idiom very nicely.

Photoshop does the best it can to move some of its functionality out of your way and into separate windows like the effects window. Double-clicking various places in Photoshop brings up different things: naming, effects editor, etc. Stuff like that could have been done to eliminate the 25 palettes OG wants to shove at you. In other words, I have collapsed and closed many and I still feel it's cluttered.

As I said, it's not that big a deal. I just don't care for them. They're cluttered. I liked OG 2's popup method better. It worked as the Inspector in Interface Builder works.

Regarding the charge that there's too many--I say just close some of them! I don't need all of them at all times, and I doubt most people do either. Or, get rid of all of them temporarily by clicking the "inspect" toolbar icon. Or, take advantage of the multiple workspace functionality to have different sets of palettes for different document needs. It's all pretty flexible.

Another cool thing is that you can close an entire "clump" of docked palettes by cliking on the round button that appears on the top palette. I also like the fact that the keyboard shortcut to open/close a palette is clearly labeled on the right. In my opinion, they really thought the whole thing out very well.

OG 3 is definitely not without its weaknesses (and I will admit that price is one of them), but to me it has no worse problems in terms of UI than other applications with tons of functionality (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.). In fact, as I said, I think it has one of the most "humane" palette-oriented interfaces I have ever seen.

Yes, those inspectors are freaking annoying. Especially the whole drop-down menu controls it all so I never know where the hell stuff is.