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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, which lack presence and make computing feel less tangible and more disposable.

You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.

And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional.

Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.

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There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic controls are actually counter-productive, especially when incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" labels on them... but those labels were actually controls in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him?

Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger.

I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed."

I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.

Generally agree here. However the Apple icons of the pre-flat-design-era, even the really skeuomorphic ones, were always pretty great; I always thought they summed up most of their respective apps pretty well. For instance, for Gamecenter, the icon for it before iOS7 was quartered, with a chesspiece, baseball bat, rocket ship and dart board in each quadrant.

They really didn't need to change it. It's now just 4 coloured bubbles, which symbolises...what? I always thought it was just so...random. It's the most irreverent icon of the iOS home screen since iOS7.

Oh yeah, I'm not lumping icons in with controls. Their icons were fine.

Oddly, Game Center is missing from my phone, so I'll take your word that the new icon sucks. I like to scorn the Photos icon: a multicolored Spirograph. Why?

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