The problem with iCal isn’t the stitched leather, it’s the fact that the buttons look ugly, the white space is wrong, the colors are bland, the layout design is lazy, and that there is no consistency in the design at all.

Go to dribble, search UI or app and find some examples of perfectly designed skeuomorphic designs, with good fonts, good white space, good colors, good buttons and elements and good readability and space optimization, and then tell me how blaming it on skeuomorphism instead of blaming it on Scott Forstall is the way to go.

A directory of eBooks IS NOT a bookshelf, and should not be treated or portrayed as one. Not to mention that almost anyone under 30, wouldn’t recognize half the objects as what they’re supposed to be anyway.

There is nowhere a recognition of the relationship between the underlying logical architecture of a “computer”, the chosen operating system, and the possibilities and limitations of a “user interface” with the machine. Perhaps Steve Jobs’ most unique and revolutionary ability was his deep understanding that he was taking the most complex and complicated machines ever developed and making them easy to use and accessible to everyone, limited, if at all, more by economic reasons than by lack of a highly technical education. And…he was designing machines which would eventually be used by other people who did not themselves design them or have the slightest idea how they worked, nor would they ever need to know.

One need not ever have touched the screen of a Windows 8 machine to know that underneath its ‘modern interface’ (modern in exactly the way ‘modern art’ might be different from earlier art) of colorful tiles lay a “menu system” of some kind that is a graphical representation of the hierarchical operating system at the heart of an information machine.

Unless one does not ever intend to use a keyboard, it seems to me them only bit of separate “hardware” apparently eliminated by a touchscreen is a mouse. How long will it be before every Windows 8 user is clamoring for a peripheral ‘mouse device’ compatible with his or her new “touchscreen” computer?

Perhaps the greatest thing lost to the world with the passing of Steve Jobs was someone strong enough to say ‘no’.

Ah, yes. I am partial to skeumorphism but that’s actually a really good logical reason for it. I am sure Steve Jobs saw it the same way.

I don’t get the love affair some internet designers seem to have with Windows Metro either – it’s “clean”, until you try to do something and find that all the functionality is hidden behind similar looking tiles. Whereas iOS is so direct, so obvious – well exactly. That’s the point.