[borxdmercurial]

The flat icons which represent nothing from the physical world in Letterpress and Clear harken back to the days of the pre-Windows application launch programs for DOS. They are non-intuitive, visually unappealing and really screw with colorblind people's heads. We live in a real, tangible world, not a digital one. We only digital devices as a tool, an augmentation of the physical world we live in, not a replacement of it. We are more "Blade Runner" than "Lawnmower Man".

[leicaman]

Windows 8 is the perfect example of why simulated depth is critical for interface design. One settings panel I saw had nothing but words, with no visual cue which is text describing the page and which text you touch to do something.

The game Letterpress works with the minimal depth and lack of skeuomorphism. Clear on the other hand is useless to me. OmniFocus is becoming more and more critical to my being able to keep track of what I do, and it's interface is rather complex, and ripe with skeumorphic goodness.

[handleym99]

"but it also looks a lot like an old-timey paper desk calendar. And there’s the rub."

It's worth pointing out that the hatred of skeuomorphism is not only based on design grounds. The dislike of people like myself (techie engineering types) is based primarily on the fact that mimicking an old-fashioned analog device limits you to only what that old-fashioned analog device can do.

Let's take the example of the calendar. A paper calendar SEEMS like a fine tool, a good starting point for both the UI and the internal design of a calendar program. BUT have you ever used a calendar program in the modern international fly-across-borders world? It completely falls apart!
How well does your calendar handle multi-hour flights?
There is an initial issue based on timezones --- does 5PM on the calendar mean 5PM in the timezone where I write down the meeting, or does it refer to 5PM in the timezone where the meeting will occur?
But it's even worse than that with flights, because the beginning and end of the flight occur in different timezones.

The problem here is that paper calendar metaphor has given you completely the wrong idea. An event (technically, at the level of the data structure) should NOT be a "date-like" string; it should consists of an array of space-time-points. Time represented as something like a Julian second (ie seconds since some starting point), space as something like a latitude+longitude, array because while most events occur in one place, some like flights "occur" in multiple places.

Once you open your mind to this sort of representation, now you have so many more things you can do. For example, if all your calendar events have an accurate location tied to them, you can throw a bucket of to-do errands into your calendar and have your phone calculate the optimal path for driving from one errand to another. Or you can have your phone automatically bring up directions at the same time that it gives you a notification about an upcoming event.

But if you insist on providing a perfect analog of a paper calendar, ALL you will have is a paper calendar.

[petilon]

Unlike printed pages Software UI needs to be interactive, which means it needs to have "perceived affordance". Flat design tends to not have any perceived affordance. Physical approach to digital design (note that this does not necessarily imply skeuomorphism) solves this problem.

[superacidjax]

Quote

I don't like it that what we are given by Apple depends on the personal tastes and design philosophies of Executive A or Executive B. I'm a democracy fan, and I firmly believe good software lets the individual user participate in the interface design by giving him a choice of skins and other design options.

People like you are why Comic Sans still exists.