Word of the Day
I learned a new word today: skeuomorphic. It's from the Greek skeuos, container or implement, and morphē, form. According to Wikipedia's definition, a skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. It's a vestigial part remaining after a redesign, included to retain a comforting familiarity.
Look at the dashboard of your car. Unless you are driving a very expensive car, it's made of plastic. Some of the plastic is formed with a pebbled pattern reminiscent of leather, there may be some with a wood grain, and then there's the chrome-painted plastic trim. You may even have hubcaps with spoke patterns like an old horseless carriage.
Do you have an e-reader? Ever notice that your electronic book has a flyleaf? And page numbers?
How about that comforting "schik!" of the non-existent shutter on your mobile phone's camera?
In fact, many computer icons and programs look like something much older. Google Play's icon looks like a paper shopping bag, to make you feel more comfortable buying utterly intangible items. I'll bet your calculator application looks a lot like an old-fashioned handheld model. Google's calendar looks like a ruled appointment pad.
Let's face it - much as we crave novelty, we love the old and familiar. We "turn on" the TV from across the room. We "dial" a phone with no dial and often no buttons. We "tune in" a radio station that might be playing across the Internet. So many of the things with which we interact have echoes of the past in their DNA.
One of the reasons Apple computers are so remarkable is the strict design rules set up by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives. I'm typing this on a MacBook Air, and there isn't an extraneous button or port anywhere on it. It is sleek, elegant, and minimalist.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the OS. OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, the ninth iteration of the OS, was released today. While it's added some nice new features and the whole feel is a bit smoother and slicker, there are design decisions that are just jarring. In the previous release they decided to make the calendar to look like a paper desk calendar, complete with a suede binding strip at the top and the ragged edges of previous pages that had been torn off. The improvement in Mountain Lion? They lost the stitching along the top and changed the name from iCal to Calendar. Oh - and the page curl animation when going from one "page" to the next is mercifully gone. The Notes app still looks like a yellow legal pad, and the default font is Comic Sans. Blow it up to full screen and the legal pad is shown in a stitched leather folder complete with overlapping flap to keep the virtual paper in place. At least the red leather address book form of Contacts has been stripped down a bit, but it's still clearly a book.
Yeah, I'm quibbling about apps, the places where programmers get to show off their Mad Skillz. The new OS itself is still the best user interface I've ever experienced, and the upgrade features are worth the $19.99 cost. What bugs me is that it could be much better, if only the developers stopped trying to make things look comfortable and familiar and starting Thinking Different.
(Note: the MacNix blog has skins to set your Calendar and Contacts back to the Zen aluminum skin.)
Look at the dashboard of your car. Unless you are driving a very expensive car, it's made of plastic. Some of the plastic is formed with a pebbled pattern reminiscent of leather, there may be some with a wood grain, and then there's the chrome-painted plastic trim. You may even have hubcaps with spoke patterns like an old horseless carriage.
Do you have an e-reader? Ever notice that your electronic book has a flyleaf? And page numbers?
How about that comforting "schik!" of the non-existent shutter on your mobile phone's camera?
In fact, many computer icons and programs look like something much older. Google Play's icon looks like a paper shopping bag, to make you feel more comfortable buying utterly intangible items. I'll bet your calculator application looks a lot like an old-fashioned handheld model. Google's calendar looks like a ruled appointment pad.
Let's face it - much as we crave novelty, we love the old and familiar. We "turn on" the TV from across the room. We "dial" a phone with no dial and often no buttons. We "tune in" a radio station that might be playing across the Internet. So many of the things with which we interact have echoes of the past in their DNA.
One of the reasons Apple computers are so remarkable is the strict design rules set up by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives. I'm typing this on a MacBook Air, and there isn't an extraneous button or port anywhere on it. It is sleek, elegant, and minimalist.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the OS. OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, the ninth iteration of the OS, was released today. While it's added some nice new features and the whole feel is a bit smoother and slicker, there are design decisions that are just jarring. In the previous release they decided to make the calendar to look like a paper desk calendar, complete with a suede binding strip at the top and the ragged edges of previous pages that had been torn off. The improvement in Mountain Lion? They lost the stitching along the top and changed the name from iCal to Calendar. Oh - and the page curl animation when going from one "page" to the next is mercifully gone. The Notes app still looks like a yellow legal pad, and the default font is Comic Sans. Blow it up to full screen and the legal pad is shown in a stitched leather folder complete with overlapping flap to keep the virtual paper in place. At least the red leather address book form of Contacts has been stripped down a bit, but it's still clearly a book.
Yeah, I'm quibbling about apps, the places where programmers get to show off their Mad Skillz. The new OS itself is still the best user interface I've ever experienced, and the upgrade features are worth the $19.99 cost. What bugs me is that it could be much better, if only the developers stopped trying to make things look comfortable and familiar and starting Thinking Different.
(Note: the MacNix blog has skins to set your Calendar and Contacts back to the Zen aluminum skin.)