Saturday, July 30, 2011

Skeuomorphic design??

So I happened to read some rants about Mac OS X Lion™’s user interface—a rant written as it turns out by a current Apple employee. These rants were not particularly charitable but I'm afraid I still found them entertaining, laced as they were with 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words (one verb in particular appeared numerous times) and complaints about stupid *pointless* skeumorphism.

Naturally I had to go look up the word. A few hours later, I was working on an HTML table; when you click on a certain element, the table would expand, and I wanted to show the number of rows you'd be adding by clicking there. It looked kind of like this:

title KLOCetc
[5] summary info here 474 ...
Got the picture? I asked a few colleagues if they thought the number made the table too busy, etc., and one of them said, yes it's busy but I still love it... and also said the design was skeuomorphic.

My reply: "I've seen this word before but for some reason your email didn't have any profanity in it."

He shot back: "It looks f*** nice, too"

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