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I've read about that extreme skeuomorphism trend before as a response for the flat design, but i think it is largely exaggerated. Outside of some Apple applicat

I've read about that extreme skeuomorphism trend before as a response for the flat design, but i think it is largely exaggerated. Outside of some Apple applications in macOS getting a leather skin or whatever for a single macOS version and getting mocked for it, there hasn't been much of a trend for unnecessary skeuomorphism on the desktop. The worst i can think of were some device driver utilities taking themability to unnecessary extremes (i remember the Windows 9x drivers for an old scanner i had using... animated AVIs of opening/closing wooden windows, for some reason :-P) but those were very rare outliers, not a trend.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I thought the skeuomorphism in iOS was pretty bad, even at the time. Although, my problem wasn't skeuomorphism so much as the result of it just looking ugly. I mean: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/IOS_6_Home_Screen.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/IOS_6_Home_Sc... Everyone is going to have different tastes, but IMO there's just nothing attractive about that! OS X, by contrast, looked consistently gorgeous before it went flat: https://i.ibb.co/qkC8kcw/Screen-Shot-2020-06-09-at-7-40-02-PM.png https://i.ibb.co/qkC8kcw/Screen-Shot-2020-06-09-at-7-40-02-P... It's also really not particularly skeuomorphic, beyond vaguely suggesting a metal surface in some places.
- nineteen999 6y ago
  Lots of skeuomorphism in audio VST/RTAS/AAx effects plugin, but you can argue there that it at least makes sense since they're designed to appeal to guitar/synth and audio engineering enthusiasts who are very used to having knobs to mess with.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    And, like, those skeuomorphic knobs looked good! Aesthetics should be what ultimately matter in these conversations.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  I agree about the OS X screenshot but... i do not understand what is skeuomorphic about the iOS 6 one. It is just a grid of icons with mostly the same photorealistic style as the OS X icons (though with a greater tendency to be squareish, but i think that fits better with the always grid-y interface that iOS has). And FWIW personally i prefer it to any later iOS style. Also i was really referring to desktop. I think a bit of skeuomorphism can be fine for a mobile device that you interact with via a touch screen. For the desktop though, i do not think it fits, but even then... it was rare, not something that was so rampant as to warrant an entire industry to change its style everywhere. The applications i had in mind were something like these: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/notes-full-screen-big.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/notes... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/reminders.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/remin...
  - SllX 6y ago
    Skeuomorphism is more than just aesthetically resembling real world objects, it’s an imitation of the behavior of real world objects. Think a digital book that duplicates the way you interact with a book, not just using fancy page turning animations, but demanding that this be the way in which you go to the next page. The advantage software has over real physical objects is that it need not duplicate the limitations of a real world object. A software book can jump to the next page instantaneously, and index your notations, and provide instant dictionary lookups. More importantly, it can’t duplicate precisely any of the real advantages of holding and interacting with a book because you’re not interacting with a book, you’re interacting with a program through a proxy device (a mouse, a trackpad, a keyboard, a screen, a d-pad, whatever). The skeuomorphic aesthetic was ugly in the eyes of many including my own, but there was an argument to be made that instead of taking advantage of the fact that this is software, Apple was leaning too hard on the skeuomorphic design trend in terms of how their applications behaved. The two most egregious examples were Notes and Newsstand, the Notes app tried to duplicate a memo pad and the only typeface was Marker Felt in a single style (to imitate handwriting) and Newsstand behaved almost exactly like a Newsstand you might find in a bookstore, holding magazines and offering them for sale. The magazine apps usually tried to duplicate the look and feel of an actual magazine, but with the addition of audio and video. Now the Newsstand is gone, you can still get magazines, but through News or the App Store a lot of publishers caught on that duplicating the look and feel of actual magazines probably doesn’t make their product more appealing. Notes is a much more powerful tool than it used to be and if it were your only Notes app, it isn’t a bad one to have and supports actual handwriting input if you so desire. That said I will say throwing out skeuomorphism didn’t have to mean throwing out depth and detail, but when Ive’s team took over software design, they imposed their own vision and that vision went too far into minimalism, foregoing detail for slight and subtle contextual clues that could be missed, and then further refined from there into something a bit more usable. Thinking about it, I don’t really have a problem with how it stands in iOS 13, although iPad OS 13 needs to fix its interaction paradigm.
hedora 6y ago
You want to see skeuomorphism gone overboard? Check out Microsoft Bob. Apparently, Microsoft and Facebook are (were, in 2017, at least) in a race to bring it back: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-facebook-next-big-thing-looks-like-microsoft-bob-2017-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-facebook-next-big-...

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I thought the skeuomorphism in iOS was pretty bad, even at the time. Although, my problem wasn't skeuomorphism so much as the result of it just looking ugly. I mean: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/IOS_6_Home_Screen.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/IOS_6_Home_Sc... Everyone is going to have different tastes, but IMO there's just nothing attractive about that! OS X, by contrast, looked consistently gorgeous before it went flat: https://i.ibb.co/qkC8kcw/Screen-Shot-2020-06-09-at-7-40-02-PM.png https://i.ibb.co/qkC8kcw/Screen-Shot-2020-06-09-at-7-40-02-P... It's also really not particularly skeuomorphic, beyond vaguely suggesting a metal surface in some places.

nineteen999 6y ago
Lots of skeuomorphism in audio VST/RTAS/AAx effects plugin, but you can argue there that it at least makes sense since they're designed to appeal to guitar/synth and audio engineering enthusiasts who are very used to having knobs to mess with.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  And, like, those skeuomorphic knobs looked good! Aesthetics should be what ultimately matter in these conversations.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I agree about the OS X screenshot but... i do not understand what is skeuomorphic about the iOS 6 one. It is just a grid of icons with mostly the same photorealistic style as the OS X icons (though with a greater tendency to be squareish, but i think that fits better with the always grid-y interface that iOS has). And FWIW personally i prefer it to any later iOS style. Also i was really referring to desktop. I think a bit of skeuomorphism can be fine for a mobile device that you interact with via a touch screen. For the desktop though, i do not think it fits, but even then... it was rare, not something that was so rampant as to warrant an entire industry to change its style everywhere. The applications i had in mind were something like these: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/notes-full-screen-big.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/notes... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/reminders.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/remin...
- SllX 6y ago
  Skeuomorphism is more than just aesthetically resembling real world objects, it’s an imitation of the behavior of real world objects. Think a digital book that duplicates the way you interact with a book, not just using fancy page turning animations, but demanding that this be the way in which you go to the next page. The advantage software has over real physical objects is that it need not duplicate the limitations of a real world object. A software book can jump to the next page instantaneously, and index your notations, and provide instant dictionary lookups. More importantly, it can’t duplicate precisely any of the real advantages of holding and interacting with a book because you’re not interacting with a book, you’re interacting with a program through a proxy device (a mouse, a trackpad, a keyboard, a screen, a d-pad, whatever). The skeuomorphic aesthetic was ugly in the eyes of many including my own, but there was an argument to be made that instead of taking advantage of the fact that this is software, Apple was leaning too hard on the skeuomorphic design trend in terms of how their applications behaved. The two most egregious examples were Notes and Newsstand, the Notes app tried to duplicate a memo pad and the only typeface was Marker Felt in a single style (to imitate handwriting) and Newsstand behaved almost exactly like a Newsstand you might find in a bookstore, holding magazines and offering them for sale. The magazine apps usually tried to duplicate the look and feel of an actual magazine, but with the addition of audio and video. Now the Newsstand is gone, you can still get magazines, but through News or the App Store a lot of publishers caught on that duplicating the look and feel of actual magazines probably doesn’t make their product more appealing. Notes is a much more powerful tool than it used to be and if it were your only Notes app, it isn’t a bad one to have and supports actual handwriting input if you so desire. That said I will say throwing out skeuomorphism didn’t have to mean throwing out depth and detail, but when Ive’s team took over software design, they imposed their own vision and that vision went too far into minimalism, foregoing detail for slight and subtle contextual clues that could be missed, and then further refined from there into something a bit more usable. Thinking about it, I don’t really have a problem with how it stands in iOS 13, although iPad OS 13 needs to fix its interaction paradigm.

hedora 6y ago

You want to see skeuomorphism gone overboard? Check out Microsoft Bob. Apparently, Microsoft and Facebook are (were, in 2017, at least) in a race to bring it back: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-facebook-next-big-thing-looks-like-microsoft-bob-2017-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-facebook-next-big-...