How are fancy graphical user interfaces coded?

I'm wondering a开发者_开发百科bout "fancy GUIes" are made.

When I say that, I have in mind softwares like iTunes, Picasa, Skype, Songbird, Spotify, Vlc (themed) ... everything that breaks with standard GUI

in which languages? what frameworks/tools are used?

Nothing beats a great design... Must likely all those applications are coded with very different frameworks. I mean, They all look different... good but different.

I don't think this fanciness has anything to do with the framework used but with the creative people behind the UI's design.

If you aim to develop great UIs forget about the framework and look for Design Tips. This, this and this books should help you with that. Please note that some of these books aim for Web Developing... but they can teach you very basics of UI designs.

It depends what platform and language you are developing on. WPF is a relatively new trend to build GUIs with the .NET framework and there are many others. Qt is an example but not the only one.

Once you decided the tools you'll be using, it's all a question of creativity as all GUI frameworks allow styling of controls in their own way. Most of the time you'll build your GUI then apply some sort of style sheet to make it look the way you want.