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Comment by mikecane | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it qualifies, but it should! PageCurl in Apple's iBooks. And those "wooden" shelves.

http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html is a 1996 paper by Jakob Nielsen & Don Gentner that criticizes too-literal visual metaphors in the Macintosh user interface. Good read.

"The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up"

The change in interfaces, particularly metaphors, is really interesting as things go from derivatives (e.g. a mechanised horse) to originals (e.g. a tractor).

It's also interesting when metaphors don't change, failing to keep up with reality, e.g. the floppy disk being used a save metaphor, when floppy disks have not been prevalent for years.

Tanks are still driven this way. Never thought of it as reins.

Apple's UI is littered with stuff like this, and it's been the cause of some famous criticisms; there's a good one tearing down the old overly-literal Quicktime interface, for example.

The Apple User Interface Guidelines for the iPad specifically encourages this sort of thing, which I found interesting. The phonebook app is a prime example.

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