Kontra wrote a great post on the real problems Apple needs to address in their software and operating systems. Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic starts with a statement everyone needs to take to heart:

The current meme of Ive coming on a white horse to rescue geeks in distress from Scott Forstallian skeuomorphism is wishfully hilarious.

Exactly. As Gruber pointed out:

The speculation regarding skeuomorphism as a factor in Forstall’s ouster has gotten out of hand. That’s not what this was about. This is about Forstall’s relationship with the other senior executives at the company. Personalities and politics, not rich Corinthian leather.

Anyway, moving on. Kontra goes on to list some of Apple’s current software issues, and concludes:

In the end, what’s wrong with iOS isn’t the dark linen behind the app icons at the bottom of the screen, but the fact that iOS ought to have much better inter-application management and navigation than users fiddling with tiny icons. I’m fairly sure most Apple users would gladly continue to use what are supposed to be skeuomorphically challenged Calendar or Notebook apps for another thousand years if Apple could only solve the far more vexing software problems of AppleID unification when using iTunes and App Store, or the performance and reliability of the same. And yet these are the twin sides of the same systems design problem: the display layer surfacing or hiding the power within or, increasingly, lack thereof.

Read Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic.

Jenna Wortham shares some fascinating stories in How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal:

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become. […]

“It’s strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” [Steve Juh] said. “It’s the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”

What most people find most disconcerting is the sudden lack (and unreliability) of information. As one person said, “You had to make plans and stick to them. It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

(link via The system that breaks is not the system that repairs)

In Bridging the gap between humans and computers Heather Kelly takes a look at some recent ethnographic research on our relationship with technology. It’s full of interesting stories like this one:

In one experiment, Ju’s group rigged automatic doors to open in different ways: Some would open slowly, then pause before fully opening; others would immediately jerk all the way open. The people walking by the doors assigned them different levels of intelligence, and thought the doors that opened in two steps just seemed smarter.

It turned out that adding the pause gave illusion of forethought, even though it was just an extra programming step. People thought the door was more intelligent because it appeared to think before carrying out an action.

One of my favorite books on this topic is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The first half of the book is all about our relationship with high tech “things” — what we find creepy vs. comforting, how different cultures behave differently, etc. Highly recommended.

Spencer Beacock takes on those who criticize Instagram as “bad art” in Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing. He starts by redefining the purpose of the photo-sharing service:

Instagram is a tool and a model for easy, non-verbal sharing of experiential and emotional data. It is image-capturing for pseudo-ethnographic recording, rather than image-capturing for beauty or composition.

His take on the much-discussed filters is really interesting as well:

Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.

The filters are visual representations of all of the other sensory and emotional data that gets connected with the images in our minds.

Spencer gives some great examples of what he means by this, and then closes the piece with a discussion of Instagram’s role in identity creation.

Read Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing.

Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem:

The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.

Good taste is harder to learn, but it’s what prevents things like iCal from happening. iCal’s design isn’t awful because it’s skeuomorphic, it’s awful because it’s skeuomorphic in a tasteless way. A more subtle texture, a less harsh gradient, and more cues from other OSX apps could make iCal less of a laughingstock.

And while we’re at it, let’s also clear up what skeuomorphism is (and isn’t), courtesy of Sacha Greif.

In August 2003 — a few months before we got married — my wife and I went on a backpacking trip through Europe. You may remember that particular summer because it was the biggest European heat wave in a hundred years or something, so there was a lot of media coverage around it. Shops in Paris ran out of fans. Sweaty, half-naked tourists packed the sreets, which I’m sure made the locals even grumpier than usual about having to cede control of their cities to a bunch of foreigners.

It was quite a trip — 8 cities in 30 days. We used a hop-on hop-off bus service and stayed in youth hostels, as you do when you have no money. It was exhausting, wonderful, eye-opening, frustrating, beautiful. I’d love to show you some photos, but that’s going to be difficult because the album is sitting on my bookshelf at home.

Taking photos was different back then. Before the trip I bought 10 rolls of 24+3 Fujifilm ISO 400 film to use with my Nikon SLR. I had to weigh the importance of every photo, because not only was film expensive, we were also going to have to get the damn things developed. Once the trip was over we spent days going through the photos, reliving the moments, carefully picking the ones we deemed worthy of being put in our album.

I page through the album often. It includes some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, during one of the most tumultuous times in my life. My memories of that time are fading slowly along with the photos, but I’ll never forget the feeling of that month.

Last month several of my friends were in Europe on vacation. I know this because I followed their every move on Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes their photos reminded me of places we went on our trip. Sometimes I was jealous. Sometimes I just thought, wow, that’s pretty.

I wonder what it would be like if my wife and I did our backpacking trip now, almost a decade later. I imagine that I’d spend most of my time either taking photos with my phone, or hunting for free wifi with my phone. Because if you don’t post photos of what you’re doing, it didn’t really happen, right?

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

I woke up yesterday morning to a few Facebook status updates from people who don’t like Halloween, and who would never let their kids participate in the evils of trick-or-treating. I was immediately filled with guilt because I allowed my daughter to enjoy herself so much the previous night by letting her dress up in her self-chosen mermaid/fairy combination.

And then I realized that I feel like that all the time on Facebook. Guilt, anger, envy… Those are the emotions that fuel activity on most social networks, but perhaps Facebook more than the others. They’re the emotions that make us share/like/comment on things. And then I thought about our Europe trip, and how much I long for that time before we became obligated to carry the burden of the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of every single person we’re connected to online. It’s what Frank Chimero once called “huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives.”

I’m not saying I’m done with Facebook — and anyway, the public Facebook breakup blog post has become such a cliché that I don’t want this to sound like one. I’m just saying that I don’t like how my Facebook newsfeed makes me feel, so I’m going to “see other people” for a while, and see how that works out. And I’m going to try to rediscover the feeling of that Europe trip from a decade ago in the lives of the people around me.

Dmitri Fadeyev makes an argument in favor of continuous scrolling in eBooks (as opposed to traditional pagination) in The Return of the Scroll:

The scroll interface suits the variable nature of the digital content that it holds, but more so, it gives the user more fine-grained control over the reading experience. It feels more natural to scroll the page on a tablet because it creates the illusion of the physical medium, of a page sliding under your fingers. A scrolling interface also stops unwanted page turns if you happen to accidentally touch the screen. I’ve been trying out the new iBooks and while I think it’s too early to tell which mode is better, so far I really like it.

Even though his argument is solid, I still prefer the page metaphor when I’m reading an eBook, and I’m trying to figure out why. The closest I can get to a reason is the idea of “edges” that Craig Mod talks about in How magazines will be changed forever:

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing.

Scrolling is exhausting — it never ends. There is no sense of accomplishment. I once heard someone refer to infinite scrolling on websites as “a game you can never win.”

In contrast, pages allow us to hang on to some sense of beginning and end. They communicate a solid sense of progress. They serve as signposts to help us figure out where to stop reading until the next time. Where scrolling is an endless blob of text, pagination fits into the idea of memory chunking because it’s a more manageable unit to deal with cognitively.

In short, pagination lets you know that you’re getting somewhere, and not just running on a treadmill. Or maybe I’m just old and need to get with the times…

Update: @jbruwer pointed me to @simuari’s concept of flick scrolling as a possible solution. Video below, but also check out the post for more details.

Update 2: I wrote a quick follow-up to address some feedback on this post.

The Flat Design Era by Allan Grinshtein for the LayerVault Blog made the rounds a week or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s a really good discussion about what they call “honest design”:

Designing honestly means recognizing that things you can do with screens and input devices can’t be done with physical objects — more importantly that we shouldn’t try copying them. It takes too much for granted. Can you imagine your pristine iPhone built into the body of an antique telephone handset? Is that beautiful design? […]

It is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.