Skeuomorphs are cultural algorithms, borrowing functional forms of the past to make the new objects of similar function more comfortably familiar. The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.
Apple's felt or leather served no functional purpose. They are faux realism, not skeuomorphism. Similarly, a digitally simulated voltmeter is not skeuomorphic, it is not a new object made familiar by borrowing a past form. It's just a digital replica.
Meanwhile, buttons with drop shadows, buttons that appear to depress complete with haptic feedback, are skeuomorphic. Apple Notes being yellow lined note paper could be called skeumorphic. And certainly, the rolodex tabs for letter groups in Contacts were clearly skeuomorphic.
This is an interesting video, and it initially defines the term correctly, but then incorrectly buckets many things as skeuomorphic to make a point, when in fact the objected to them tended to be they were not skeuomorphic at all.
Borrowing functional forms of the past to make new affordances comfortable and familiar, given them the right feel in your use, remains a good idea, at least for a transitional time.
There's a tremendous advantage in making new things feel "comfortably familiar". His iPad drawing apps are great examples. I showed Paper to a Mom recently, who immediately purchased the full kit for her kids.
It's interesting to me that the riotously successful iPhone 4 has a somehow more familiar form than the iPhone 3. The Braun influence let Apple step out of a specific time and make an object that doesn't feel out of place on a Mad Men set.
It has a comfortable approachable familiarity, unlike the other plasticky gizmos at the mobile booth in the mall. These are known materials, glass and brushed steel, familiar to the touch, and emphasize the touchability of its OS.
I think that definition misses most of the point that the similarity is a deliberate throwback. I'd say a skeuomorph is a (often otherwise unnecessary) design feature that makes a new object feel familiar.
"Skeuomorphs are material metaphors. They are informational attributes of artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory. They help us map the new onto an existing cognitive structure..." — Nicholas Gessler
> You seem to be saying the he's very talented, so it's likely not a lack of ability, but a lack of will.
False dichotomy ... If a developer does quality work as claimed above, its unlikely he's missing deadlines from lack of will, wasting time, or laziness.
Thankfully the post continues by offering more likely reasons:
> there are blocks in his way preventing him from executing ... feature creep, unexpected maintenance, infrastructure problems, people problems... figure out how to help fix those problems, rather than just hand-waving as "missing deadlines".
> he is consistently missing deadlines and has failed to be very productive. His work is of top quality (why I selected him), but his progress is disappointingly slow
Programmers "misunderestimate" deadlines. There are countless books written about this, and very little to do about it other than recognize it as an inconvenience.
The largest factor is usually "scope creep", where business interests inject additional details as the project progresses, each of which adds time but rarely get adjusted into the estimate. All these time deficits accumulate and interact to snowball delays far beyond expectations of both technical and marketing teams.
Either stoically push deadlines back for every change, or ruthlessly postpone these requests till future releases.
Also keep in mind that if your startup is doing something new, you're often asking for deadlines on "inventing the lightbulb". It will work when it works.
Startup development is usually not "engineering". Building a bridge is a known and quantifiable effort. Inventing a new business engine is often not.
In the video I didn't see a medium white Canon lens as illustrated there. I'm not sure guessing at what a man in a hostile zone is brandishing from behind a corner is going to help:
Whatever it is, don't duck in and out behind corners pointing your black tube at military gunships or approaching convoys. Don't bet your life on whether the guy behind the turret paid to keep the zone clear can sort that out while you pop in and out of view.
Right, because photo stills from "collateralmurder.com" are intended to convey the ease of identification from a moving helicopter during a live situation? There are other form factors for RPGs:
I wouldn't want to be wrong on the fly about whether it was an RPG or a black telephoto barrel that's sticking around the corner aiming at my crew. Presumably I'd use other cues to help decide.
The site leaves out stills showing the key decision-triggering factor - surreptitious behavioral cues. Here is one they left out:
The site talks about the cameraman shooting a picture of "whatever is occurring further down the street" but the video, even in slow replay (that the airmen didn't have in the moment), suggests the man is taking cover then popping out to aim at the helicopter. The man appears to "engage" the helicopter. Thinking in context of 2007, that was incredibly dumb:
Want a picture of an American chopper while you're walking in a hostile zone with militia carrying what even "collateralmurder.com" admits "might be a weapon" and "appears to be a weapon" -- ok, stand in the middle of the street with your camera, wave your obvious press card while wearing your obvious press jacket, and take your picture. Don't duck around corners then share the intel with your gun carrying group.
Troops made a call about the RPG vs camera (though certainly doesn't look like a white Canon lens as shown in the website, looks black, and that tube and the way he aims it sure looks like bazooka or anti-tank RPG considering troops can't see around the corner). After that judgment call was based on behavior more than identifying the weapon, what happened after that could have been interpreted as combatants feigning nonchalance until their next chance to ambush from behind cover.
Even assuming it's an unmarked photographer, presence of a war correspondent in a hostile zone does not mean the armed men with him are not combatants, that they should be immune from attack, or that they should be free to wander around armed studying long distance photo intel of their enemy to better plan an ambush.
Even "collateralmurder.com" says the men are carrying "something that might be a weapon" and "what appears to be a weapon" and that site is hardly unbiased.
I understand the pigeonhole filing example, but I quit "filing" years ago. It's tedious. Tagging also takes too much thought, particularly at recall time: did I tag that "development" or "programming"? I just use search.
I have a script that monitors my desktop. Any file not modified within the past 8 hours is moved to a folder dated for the end of this week. That gives me 52 folders a year, granular enough to find a file manually if I know roughly when I dealt with it.
My desktop stays clean except for what I'm actively working on, and I don't look for files hierarchically or by category/tag. To find something, I use Spotlight search. That's faster than navigating a folder hierarchy would be even if I knew exactly where the file was.
That's also why I love Gabor's reMail on the iPhone.
First, I love reMail. Gabor breathes email and search. If you own an iPhone and use Gmail or Google Apps, get reMail--you'll thank him.
That said, it's easy to skim this article and nod, "Yeah! Yeah!", but when we're discussing these, laymen may need to know a few of these seem over-simplified.
> "TCP connections are great, but for transferring large amounts of email securely, HTTP is the way to go."
2. I generally have at least 5 devices using IMAP (on Google Apps) at once, and interleave my interactions with these devices arbitrarily, yet expect each to show me the exact same state when I look at it. Keeping them all in the apparently same state is the sort of intractable software problem bedeviled with implementation details, and I agree throwing out IMAP and starting over with lessons learned could be easier than, say, the RFC linked below.
3. http://ajaxian.com/archives/json-vs-xml-the-debate - Seems this point is something like GIF vs JPG vs PNG, with a bit of "Markdown vs HTML" thrown in. Meanwhile, both XML and JSON are missing an important concept given labels/folders and conversations: multiple references to single objects.
4. Conversations or threads exist today as In-Reply-To: GUID and References: GUID headers, among others, but see the JSON problem above. We don't realize these headers are there because clients generally ignore these and try to group on Subject instead. Gmail grouping respecting existing headers is much better, but from usability point of view, Gmail's approach makes it challenging to bulk delete individual matching messages across a broad set of conversations. For example, to bulk move or mark all messages on a particular date results in the full conversations being moved or marked. So I like this idea as long as I can still optionally operate on sets of messages without affecting the rest of the conversation.
5. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/organizing-chaos-fo... - It's not yet clear that people prefer tags to folders. After all, monkeys don't expect a banana to be in two boxes at once. I don't want to label anything with keywords. I want semantic search.
6. Excellent point. Changing GUIDs out from under us is just lame. Having had to resort to http://github.com/rgrove/larch recently to move a decade of email onto Google Apps because Thunderbird was putting new IDs on each moved message, I fully agree this problem is evil.
7. Seems we're stuck with MIME until we get rid of every legacy email server in the world, or control what servers our recipients use. Between the new server and new clients, sure. But the server will have to know it to send it. Granted, IMAP is for receiving, and SMTP is for sending, but something in the chain has to know MIME.
8. "Call" an HTTP endpoint that "returns" when messages arrive? Just nomenclature, since IDLE is a "call" that "returns" when state changes. Either way, the socket is held open, so neither of these is "push". Maybe Gabor meant "posts back" instead of "returns"? In any case, under the hood, iPhone push and Microsoft ActiveSync are exploiting out-of-band channel such as SMS to notify the phone it should poll (or in case of ActiveSync, maybe doing a "long pull"). See http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/26/120520.aspx versus http://tools.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-maes-lemonade-p-...
9. Will the RFC specify a search results algorithm, or will the same search return different results depending on the implementation of mail server the client is connected to? We manipulate a "client" tool to perform the search and access the email, so our natural mental model is of the client at hand, not of the remote server. This lets the brain wrap itself around Gmail's web search versus Apple Mail's search box vs OS X Spotlight vs Gabor's reMail all returning different results. Practially speaking, search at the server does make far more sense from both a data retention and security standpoint. I have 509 MB of index in Gabor's "reMail" app on my iPhone, and would rather not.
Thanks for brainstorming this, and thanks for a kickass iPhone app.
Techcrunch could be delivered as a PDF. I get it on my Kindle.
Just as most new web sites are not startup companies, most existing web sites are not apps.
The distinction and difference is that a software application helps a user perform manipulation or transformation of data as useful work.
Most websites, despite simple interactivity (e.g. search), are still published as "content" for consumption within a content access application, not for manipulating work|play|creative output.
Sheldon State Community College in Alabama had their information rejected when their paperwork said that 14,500 jobs were created with the $27,502 they received.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Copyright allows snippets of works for discussion under concept of fair use. It doesn't allow wholesale republishing into a distribution channel of the complete original work -- even if your first line does say "just for learning".
