> Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company
And thus ended the reign of skeuomorphism at Apple. Or, at least, the reign of hyper-realism and hyper-whimsy in UI design. Jobs or Forstall always seemed to favour it, but could you imagine Jony Ive signing off on a Podcasts app where half the screen is a reel-to-reel tape that bounces when you pause?
I was so confused when I saw that app a couple of months back. Why spend so much effort creating an admittedly aesthetically pleasing design, name check Rams and his principles, and so completely miss the point of "as little design as possible" and have a non-functional spinner display for the current conditions?
And having such a prominent °F/°C switch is just baffling. This is not a function used regularly by the vast majority of users.
(Shrug) I don't know anything about this app but I don't immediately get the hate for it. It looks cool.
The spinner dial may not be functional, but it could be and should be, because weather conditions change incrementally and (more or less) predictably. If it's humid and cloudy and the barometric pressure is falling, then it would make sense for the spinner dial to move slowly between "cloudy" and "raining" positions, for instance.
And maybe the author of the app is an advocate of the metric system and wants to encourage users to treat the °F/°C switch as a prominent educational feature. Like I said, I don't know anything about it, but the amount of negativity being aimed at the app seems difficult to justify.
I'm not sure if that part of the comment was aimed at me: I don't hate it, I just think it fails at reaching or perhaps even understanding its stated design goals.
Mostly referring to 89a's criticism ("Same goes for this stupid piece of shit.") I usually reserve language like that for politicians, Sony products, and iTunes, not cheesy weather apps.
What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is.
If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original designs. Why take a 30 year old tape recorder and mimic that, is that really the mark of originality that Apple stands for? It seems quite hypocritical to me.
It’s most certainly not hypocritical to believe that there should be time limited monopolies on designs and copying designs for which that monopoly has run out. Simple as that.
Don’t argue over ridiculous stuff like that. There is no need for these cheap polemics.
That's never been the philosophical basis of copyright. Copyright is a limited, artificial monopoly designed to encourage creation. It's not that copying is "bad", it's that limiting copying for a short time might encourage people to create new works.
Thomas Jefferson articulates this reasoning, talking about patents:
>If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. -- http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
1. That Braun thing was produced decades ago, and probably they haven't sold a single one of them in the last decade or so.
2. A podcasts app on an iPad, is in no way competing to an ancient cassette player.
3. They're in different categories. It's like if I "copy" a Mercedes logo for a window. Though I'm not particularly in favor of Apple/Samsung case ruling, it's clearly different to copy an element for a competing product (a tablet) or another product that's a whole different beast and is no longer for sale.
There is a world of difference between being influenced by something and doing an exact copy. One is legal, accepted as beneficial to society and common place within the design community. The other isn't.
You are either woefully naive or being disingenuous to assume that the two are the same.
I could matter. Companies that have highly valuable patents can create what are called "patent portfolios" which take some patents, layer them with other patents and use the legal trick of "continuation" to effectively get patent coverage for portfolio as a whole by constantly developing newer, tightly-coupled patents.
Braun, if they wished, could have done so. Of course, I'm sure in that case, Apple would have probably licensed the patents or worked around them.
Excellent news. I have always been surprised by the opposing philosophies guiding hardware vs software design in Apple products. They consistently offer beautiful hardware designs that emphasize simplicity, sometimes at a cost in usability (e.g. the sharp edges of the newer iPhones are less ergonomic than the first models). On the other hand, their software makes few compromises in usability, which is a good thing. But it never showed this taste for simplicity and purity that makes Apple devices so appealing from the outside. From the brushed metal windows and shiny plastic scroll-bars of early OS X, to the leather borders in iOS applications, Apple under Jobs and Forstall has pursued the opposite direction. Stock Android actually has the edge here (although inconsistently), something I would not say about the hardware or usability. Hopefully this change means we will see Apple software that preserves usability without the tacky visuals.
I actually like a lot of apple's skeuomorphism. I think it makes digital interfaces more natural. I think at least some of the iPhones success can be attributed to the fact that less savvy people find the skeuomorphisms easy to relate to everyday things and helps bridge the gap between, for example, using a real reel-to-reel vs. using a digital representation thereof. Although I agree that the podcast app is too much, I would really miss the leather textures and whatnot of other iOS apps.
There are some interesting ways iOS uses fabric patterns, it's quite clever. But I don't think that making things look like their old-school equivalents really helps people, rather hinders.
+1. The app should have never been created in the first place. The old podcast functionality was basic, but was better than having to switch back-and-forth between two different apps as it is now.
Metro is defined by flat background colors, square corners and no shading. You can have a non-skeumorphic interface without any of those features, and given Apple's history of interface design, it would surprise me if they adopted any of them. Apple loves rounded rectangles, gradient backgrounds and shading to indicate depth, though shine and real-like textures may be on the way out.
Shading and round corners are skeuomorphic, as is indicating depth on a piece of glass.
What Apple loves is irrelevant (if one is willing to ascribe emotional states to corporations). Daimler-Benz loved steering tillers. Ford loved hand throttles.
Think about the way in which the interfaces of automobiles changed over the first forty years as they went from horseless carriages to widespread adoption. That's what we're seeing in computer interfaces.
Rounded corners aren't necessarily skeumorphic; they're a style choice just as rounded cabinets and trim are a (popular) style choice. Likewise, shading and gradients to give an impression of depth and lighting are often used to distinguish items that are clickable or as a separator. These are artistic tools that can be used to various effects, but are not skeumorphic in the sense of trying to imitate a familiar object from everyday life. Virtual representations of objects can be 3D without being skeumorphic; the illusion of depth can be used to convey information.
Skeumorphic features are defined by the fact that they are unnecessary carry-overs from older or different objects. They can be useful and style choices too, but a digital button does not need to indicate depth, whereas a mechanical button does, because it needs to protrude from the surface in order to be pressed.
A mechanical button absolutely does not need to protrude from the surface to be pressed - not only can it start at surface level and be pressed into the device, it can return to starting position and remain flush. Look at most microwaves - totally flat, presses in very slightly, returns to flush. The power button on the mac pro (that neglected tower!) does the same. Also, capacitive buttons exist which, although not strictly mechanical, have a similar behavior.
Protruding buttons are merely a user interface choice. They were never a functional requirement.
Not so slippery. "Tape reels" won't make sense to someone who has never seen a reel to reel. A knobby thing that protrudes, as if you could feel it if you ran your hand over the surface, transcends culture and applies to any normally functioning human being.
The difference between skeumorphism and visual affordance is the difference between "intuitive" and intuitive. One makes a reference to past experience, and is built on natural affordances. The other is not.
That said, I think what you're getting at is it might be impossible to completely eliminate skeumorphism. I agree with that. There's going to be at least a sliver left in almost any interface. That's just one of the byproducts of our having a culture.
An image of a tape reel is to recording audio as an icon of a floppy disk is to saving documents — a lazy visual shortcut, requiring a non-trivial semantic context. What is the percentage of humans alive today who have used a tape reel recorder?
The boundary between affordances and skeuomorphs is perfectly clear. Just ask yourself — does the form of the design element in question follow its function?
>Shading and round corners are skeuomorphic, as is indicating depth on a piece of glass.
And flat background colors represent a uniformly lit smooth surface. I don't think that mimicking some basic material properties is really skeumorphic.
It's more when that's taken to the point of looking/acting like a specific physical object (like Game Center's pool table felt) that I'd apply the term.
Skeuomorphic implies that a design feature is no longer necessary or useful. That's not the case here - you still need visual indicators of the extents of a window, and of what's manipulable versus what's static content, and of what's the currently active or selected object. Apple's current set of visual indicators are obviously not the only option, but if they went to a UI as flat as a typical minimalist web design, usability would suffer.
I don’t think Apple will go that far. I don’t even think they will overtake stock Android when it comes to ditching skeumorphism and removing affordances.
I also don’t think there will be radical changes. Remember how OS X looked before Corinthian leather arrived? That’s what I see more off in the future. Probably with an updated look (like the new iTunes?), but not much more.
If you want to know how that looks on iOS I would maybe look at something like the editing interface of iMovie, Safari, or Mail.
Next version, probably not unless there is the perception of a burning platform.
But over the long haul, I don't see how Apple can stick with an increasingly dated and arbitrary visual paradigm. How many people have actually been around real to real tape decks or owned a leather desk calendar? And as digital devices like smartphones become more ubiquitous, fewer and fewer people will.
We've already seen lots of small changes to take advantage of the extra screen height. Virtually all the iOS built-in apps and many third-party apps have made tweaks. Not just stretching the size of the main area in which you view data or other stuff, but actual interface changes as well.
This was also my first thought on the departure. The announcement did look ambiguous on whether Ive would be the final sign-off for software UI. I certainly hope he is, for the reasons you mentioned.
Doubt we'll be seeing any major change like that at least until iOS8. For iOS7 it seems too soon. We might also see it in Mac OS XI, but I also doubt that's coming until 2014.
iTunes 11 is obviously not free of skeuo. There is at least the brushed metal volume knob and the pseudo-LCD display. I don't see how the new iTunes went away from the old iTunes, skeuo-wise, apart from the less-but-still-skeuo-looking LCD display.
> Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company
And thus ended the reign of skeuomorphism at Apple. Or, at least, the reign of hyper-realism and hyper-whimsy in UI design. Jobs or Forstall always seemed to favour it, but could you imagine Jony Ive signing off on a Podcasts app where half the screen is a reel-to-reel tape that bounces when you pause?