3 ms·

I like the way he puts it on the baffling share icon: “ I'm still pretty confused with what that arrow out of a box even means.” To me that sums up the era whe

I like the way he puts it on the baffling share icon: “ I'm still pretty confused with what that arrow out of a box even means.” To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era. Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.” And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.

wruza 7y ago
It is not “share icon” though, it is a general action button that contains everything you can do with the object presented.
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  Well ... now it is. It didn't use to be like this a few years ago.
skohan 7y ago
> Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that. Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly. Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.
leokennis 7y ago
The pre-iOS7 share button looked very similar: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/pull-to-refresh-safari-iOS-6.jpg https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/p... Also I do not understand the criticism. The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.) The only valid criticism IMHO is that the share button is often used to do stuff that isn't sharing.
- ascagnel_ 7y ago
  > The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.) More specifically, the box represents the app running on the phone, and it shares content outside of the app. For example, you can "share" a picture from Safari into the Photos or Files apps to save it for later. It's a very, very leaky and ill-defined abstraction.

wruza 7y ago

It is not “share icon” though, it is a general action button that contains everything you can do with the object presented.

leadingthenet 7y ago
Well ... now it is. It didn't use to be like this a few years ago.

skohan 7y ago

> Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that. Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly. Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.

leokennis 7y ago

The pre-iOS7 share button looked very similar: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/pull-to-refresh-safari-iOS-6.jpg https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/p... Also I do not understand the criticism. The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.) The only valid criticism IMHO is that the share button is often used to do stuff that isn't sharing.

ascagnel_ 7y ago
> The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.) More specifically, the box represents the app running on the phone, and it shares content outside of the app. For example, you can "share" a picture from Safari into the Photos or Files apps to save it for later. It's a very, very leaky and ill-defined abstraction.