Most of the UI elements seem to come from other PSDs of stuff he's already created.
Inspiration from Basecamp and it looks like some Flickr screenshots... totally normal.
he was using them as inspiration, i don't think he actually copied any ui elements (unsure about where he got the photographs, but it's common practice to pay a royalty fee or use free if it's not required). as an example, many good designers will look at apple's design elements in mac os x or iphone os. you'll hear steve jobs got a lot of his inspiration from other sources too. that's how design works; you'll take something that's good right now and you make it better.
"The inspiration for the type of plastic case (a first for computers) for the Apple II came from Jobs seeing a Cuisinart food processor in the kitchen section of Macy’s.
Additionally, Jobs showed up at a design meeting for the Quicktime software product with a brochure from Hewlett-Packard with the H-P logo in a brushed metal.
The brushed metal ended up being adopted in across much of Apple’s software and some high-end hardware including the Safari Web browser and iCal calendar." Leader Kahney, Inside Steve's Brain
Good to hear, because I find the same thing with regard to app design--long periods of mental churning followed by brief glimmers of clarity and insight.
I routinely tell my co-founder that design, for me, is constantly iterating until it doesn't suck. The only designs I'm very happy with are the ones that are extremely minimalist (my own blog, my wife's site), and those are the ones in which I'm JUST trying to present the content, and even those end up with iterating towards 'stark' until I have to put something back on the page. Then I call it done.
The other common adage between Steve and I, whenever he doesn't like something, is that I'll tell him to 'give it time.' Sometimes, he grows to love the thing he hated, and sometimes, it evolves into something much better.
Again, I am appreciative of those designers who can just throw something down that looks awesome on the first or second try, but at least I'm getting to the point that the average wireframe isn't better than my best efforts.
wget http://vminko.org/storage/video-dl.sh && chmod + x video-dl.sh && ./video-dl.sh vm 17158963