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I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.

I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.

You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.

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IMHO skeuomorphic design had a few wins, but also plenty of losses. Sometimes the real world interface is just not as intuitive as it should have been.

But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.

This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.

> This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.

Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.

I was actually complaining about this the other day: there is no manual (or even a searchable database) of recognized commands/features. I often discover that something was possible with Google Assistant when the announcement comes that it's being removed.

When you start a timer with Siri, it often announces that you can also tell it to stop the timer by saying stop. This tells me that even the most rudimentary functions of starting and stopping timers is not yet learned by users. Every time I hear that message I think of how much of a failure this whole thing has been.

Oh timers, you mean the one thing I use daily for cooking where they changed the recognized phrase between iOS 17 and iOS 18? It used to understand "notify me in 15 minutes" meant to set a timer. Now it asks for what I want to be reminded about to add it to the calendar. I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".

So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).

Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.

>I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".

Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.

OMG thanks, it also works in french!

This goes even deeper in the "undiscoverable commands" issue at hand.

"notify me in 15 minutes" feels natural and casual, and how I'd expect to interact with modern voice assistants. "set a 15 minutes timer" feels overly formal and redundant (it does not help that in French, a timer is "minuteur", so you repeat the "minutes" sound twice), and how I'd expect to interact with old voice assistants. This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.

>This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.

Among the many shortcomings of Siri is that it seems as if it's not good with verbs. I've learned to avoid them as much as possible. Put another way, it's better with nouns, so I focus on them. I guess that's why

"15-minute timer" and

"15 minutes"

work well. But similarly, I wanted to use the stopwatch the other day. Not something I ever really do. Just saying, "Stopwatch" got it open. And testing now on some non-Apple apps also worked (in case Siri has some built-in pro-Apple bias). One was WhatsApp. The other was an app for an insurance and banking company. That one, just saying its name opened the contact card I have for the company. That's fair. Trying again, and saying "company name app" opened the app.

Of course, sometimes the verbs are necessary. But I've had more success when I could avoid them. Do note that I say all this using a Siri-only phone that is too old for any of Apple Intelligence that may get mixed in with Siri.

It's not a huge deal, but on google devices, setting a timer is different from setting an alarm. the end result is more or less the same thing, but it uses different underlying functionality and I have to remember to say timer instead of alarm when I'm cooking.

Yep this gets me all the time. The biggest difference is that a timer will be displayed whereas an alarm is in the background. The display is very handy when cooking.

Saying ”set an alarm in 15 minutes” vs ”set at timer for 15 minutes” to Siri also do different things

Really? For me both commands set a timer for 15 minutes.

iOS also differentiates between a timer and an alarm.

This is why I call these voice "commands" spells. They feel very much like a spell. You have to remember them, and if you don't remember 'em exactly, they don't do what you expect. Siri (and Alexa for that matter) is a big failure. After 12 years of having a voice "assistant" in my pocket, I still don't use it for anything important and/or useful.

It’s a disconnect between the vision and the reality. Users shouldn’t have to learn Siri, it should just work every time no matter how you ask as long as it’s understandable to a person.

But the reality is it doesn’t work and users have to specifically learn the few things it can do.

It's a disconnect because we have this vision that language (as commonly spoken, not legalese) is perfectly clear and precise. But the reality is that even two live people who seem to speak the same language will misunderstand each other, including for "basic" things. So how should a computer be able to read your mind, when it most likely doesn't even have the context of where you're from?

Regarding the "notify" vs "timer", I had a very similar experience with a friend. I went to a bakery, and she asked me to get her some kind of pastry. To me, she meant some kind of bread. Queue confused faces on both sides when she asked where her stuff was. Sure, it's still in the broad "baked goods" category, just like a reminder and a timer. This was in France, both living in major cities 200 km apart. It's not like some extreme variation of English from the other side of the world.

Theoretically, large language models have enough common sense to understand all variations of natural language commands, and to ask for clarification if they think some request is ambiguous. It's probably not yet feasible to do Siri via an LLM, or not via a properly large one (that has the necessary intelligence).

I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism. I’m seeing “skeuomorphism” increasingly used for the former, where people mostly mean “not flat design”, whereas originally it meant only the latter.

> I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism.

Likely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action..., but it's a jargon word most tech people and others don't know, and it creates debates about what it means among those that do know it.

I usually say something like it should be obvious it's clickable, or obvious what it does, when it comes up.

Affordances is a more general term, not necessarily purely visual, or even visual at all (it can be tactile, or auditory, etc.). It doesn’t denote a particular visual design, and full-blown skeuomorphic elements would also exhibit affordances. But yes, it approaches the heart of the problem.

Signifiers? https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94265/whats-the-diffe...

> Affordances are what an object can do (truth). Perceived affordances are what one thinks an object can do (perception). Signifiers make affordances clearer (closing the gap between truth and perception). Signifiers often reduce number of possible interpretations and/or make intended way of using an object more explicit.

> A grey link on the screen might afford clicking (truth). But you might perceive it just as a non-interactive label (perception). Styling it as a button (background, shadow etc.) is a signifier that makes it clearer that the link can be clicked.

I don't think there's any more widely known terms here, and not any used within general tech audiences. I'd like it if there was a useful shorthand too but devs/users/clients are probably going to stick with e.g. "I couldn't tell that was a button" because the above have failed to catch on.

"Visual cues" feels accurate enough. I immediately understand "Buttons should look like buttons".

Thanks. Signifiers looks like a perfect fit here since they are elements which signify their affordance. It should ideally get more mainstream instead of someone inventing a new word.

Yeah, I find it interesting these words haven't become more mainstream though when they've been around for a while, and maybe that ship has sailed. They don't resonate? The definitions are too complex? (they often cause debates) They're not guessable? They don't shorten what you mean enough? ("it should look more like a button" isn't much longer than "it's lacking signifiers" to be worth the jargon) I see people drop "afford/affordance" into replies occasionally but most people don't know what it means and it rarely adds anything.

"Skeuomorphism" has caught on. It's not guessable but then it saves quite a few words so helps with communication. It probably got picked up by some tech news/blog sites and reached critical mass because skeuomorphism vs flat design resonates with people.

Ideomorphic seems like it would work for that.

Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic

That seems to fit amazingly well here too.

This is exactly the problem with Siri - if it was nothing but a vocal command line that I had to memorize exactly how to talk to it, and I could find a list of commands to learn, it'd be 1000x better.

This is similar to WolframAlpha. Theoretically, it can do countless different things, but you wouldn't know about them just from looking at the empty text box. The difference to something like ChatGPT is that it can interpret arbitrary commands, even if it can't properly execute them.

I think one thing that is involved in this is conventions, and when you've learned one set of rules on how to communicate on one form of interface that it transfers to other applications on that interface. If there's certain ways to use graphical elements, gestures, console keywords/option flags, spoken keywords, while other applications have the freedom to do their own thing it should be seen as better not to diverge and reinvent the wheel (so each needs learning its own rules) too much without good reason.

> having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely

A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.

I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.

This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.

Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.

> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense

This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?

(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)

> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?

I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".

Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.

> My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon

That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".

We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.

The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent

The New York Times uses a box wrapped up in a bow.

I can't link to it because it's rendered as an in-line SVG, but this is HN, so picture this in your mind:

  <svg aria-hidden="true" width="19" height="19" viewBox="0 0 19 19"><path d="M18.04 5.293h-2.725c.286-.34.493-.74.606-1.17a2.875 2.875 0 0 0-.333-2.322A2.906 2.906 0 0 0 13.64.48a3.31 3.31 0 0 0-2.372.464 3.775 3.775 0 0 0-1.534 2.483l-.141.797-.142-.847A3.745 3.745 0 0 0 7.927.923 3.31 3.31 0 0 0 5.555.459 2.907 2.907 0 0 0 3.607 1.78a2.877 2.877 0 0 0-.333 2.321c.117.429.324.828.606 1.171H1.155a.767.767 0 0 0-.757.757v3.674a.767.767 0 0 0 .757.757h.424v7.53A1.01 1.01 0 0 0 2.588 19h14.13a1.01 1.01 0 0 0 1.01-.959v-7.56h.424a.758.758 0 0 0 .757-.757V6.05a.759.759 0 0 0-.868-.757Zm-7.196-1.625a2.665 2.665 0 0 1 1.01-1.736 2.24 2.24 0 0 1 1.574-.313 1.817 1.817 0 0 1 1.211.818 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202 1.453 2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838 1.191h-3.431l.272-1.413ZM4.576 2.386a1.837 1.837 0 0 1 1.221-.817 2.23 2.23 0 0 1 1.565.313 2.624 2.624 0 0 1 1.01 1.736l.242 1.453H5.182a2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838-1.19 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202-1.495h.03ZM1.548 6.424h7.54V9.39h-7.58l.04-2.967Zm1.181 4.128h6.359v7.287H2.729v-7.287Zm13.777 7.287h-6.348v-7.307h6.348v7.307Zm1.181-8.468h-7.53V6.404h7.53V9.37Z" fill="#121212" fill-rule="nonzero"></path></svg>

I don't even see the SVG anymore, I just see blonde, brunette, gift box with a bow.

The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.

Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.

I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.

And the "upper case" vs. "lower case" distinction, even though we no longer use a printing press in which each letter is sorted into a different box, or "case", depending on if it's a capital or not.

And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.

* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.

TIL upper/lower case. I always thought it was because upper case letters look taller, thus are "up" while lowercase are smaller thus "low" on the typeface line.

Tsk, tsk! You're using thorn (ð) for two different 'th' sounds. Old English used 'eth' (þ) to mark both sounds but it'd be more precise to use both letters like in Icelandic, eg for the above: þings, ðe (although the vowel in 'the' is actually more of a schwa [ǝ] usually, or [i] before vowels). Also, you're still sticking to some English spelling pecularities there...

In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:

“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”

;)

Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.

Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".

Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.

No worries :)

Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.

Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).

The benefit of skeuomorphism was that it was universal.

Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"

Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.

The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.

It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.

You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.

But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...

The way I've come to understand "icon" is that it's as used like "religious icon". A painting of a particular figure is not so much about that figure, but what they represent, it's somewhat abstract. The save icon isn't about the literal bit of media as what you could do with it.

> Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"

> Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

I had a discussion about this with my parents, who saw the 5" disks actually flopping back in the days, but never cared enough about computers.

They thought the floppy icon meant it was saved on their drive, when it was actually commited to the cloud service they were using. They spent a while looking around, in their Document folder, Download folder etc. and gave up after a while.

I can't remember which service they were using, but boy were they pissed.

Well, things were fine before Microsoft, Apple, and Google decided that organizing things was too much to ask of the average user, and launched into the insanity of {latest version of multi-location library} and {cloud storage that pretends it's local storage}.

Adobe does the same, most businesses that can afford it will try going that route, as it means user lock-in and more subscription money down the road.

This reminds me of the Figma rant on how you can't do presentations offline even if you save your slides to disk, that's where the whole industry is trending.

IMHO this is precisely why clinging to old metaphors might not be optimal.

While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.

Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.

Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.

Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.

> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

Knobs work as a tactile interface that require two fingers minimum to rotate predictably. With digital screens we lost the tactile element, and mandated a new one finger (thumb) minimum. Interfaces had to adapt, which is why knobs were replaced with sliders. Changes like this happened all over the place; not because of "gen-Z", but because they were the most effective solution for the platform.

> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists

Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.

Personally I'd just make it a button that says "Save", but I doubt that's going to be popular.

"Save" is 4 characters in English, but it's over twice as long in German (9 Characters), and even longer in French (11). The variable length means the UX for word-based buttons would need to be designed for the longest case, which is why we mainly see them in title bars for navigation, or in very sparse UI.

Especially not in non-English countries.

Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.

The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.

So I don't know what the point of this is.

Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.

I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.

This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.

And while we're making the button say Save, perhaps we could put other buttons around it that just say what they do. We could even group those buttons into common types of activities, and then hide them in some sort of flyout dialog until you want to actually use them. We could group all File activities, all activities relating to the View, all activities relating to getting Help. This idea might revolutionize computing!

USB flash drives are still quite universally used and a direct replacement for the floppy's functionality. I've seen a USB stick shaped icon used as a metaphor for saving in some places. But I agree with the sibling post that the text "save" probably has more staying power.

I find it comical that macOS displays an HDD icon for internal storage. It's even using the "old", skeuomorphic art style, from before the flat design.

(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)

OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.

I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".

> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.

Yeah, about that.

When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.

Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.

I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.

Having lived through the whole iPhone 4 thing, I'm extremely hesitant to upgrade my iPhone 13 Pro here.

To be clear, an irreversible update caused my iPhone 4 to become immediately unusable.

I have to admit that I don't feel that on my old SE 2, but I do see Apple not caring about the device type. Some of the UI elements overlap og doesn't line after the update to iOS 18.

This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.

My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.

This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.

I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.

From the preview so far I'm not excited.

I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.

Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.

When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.

It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.

Someone installed beta and posted a screenshot down below somewhere; control center with these glass buttons over a colorful springboard icons grid turns interface into a visual mess.

I wonder if they manage to change anything or tweaks, polishing (sic!) will happen over next or two iOS releases.

  > Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something"

like a lot of redesigns, its more about marketing and 'the new shiny' than anything else imo

Maybe it's because I'm living in a country where we had to catch up with marketing and advertising after communism fell and I have some kind of "immunity" and cynical approach to such forms of product presentations... But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.

And I honestly felt sorry for woman who tries to sell me amazing emoji combining "technology". Who actually uses this beside the obvious die-hard fans on dedicated sites and forums.

  > But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.

get the same vibes as well, its basically a 90min commercial (and at a developers conference no less)

> I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely.

As I child of the nineties I was surprised to eventually learn that a file in a folder was a real thing and not only a computer concept.

> it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design

I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine.

But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk calendars work? How Podcasts looked like a reel-to-reel recorder and waste tons of screen space? Contacts app imitating the limitations of a physical black book because that's how real books work?[0]

If you like brushed metal or whatever, right on. Again, not my thing, but you do you! But I cannot abide the fake limitations that skeuomorphic design pushed onto software in the name of making apps work just like their physical equivalents. The UI on the magic boxes we're typing this on are limited only by our creativity. Please, please don't infect them with the real world's restrictions when it's not necessary!

[0] https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/

Agreed. Use the medium’s capabilities! Don’t cripple it for the sake of familiarity.

I think you have a romanticized revisionary memory of back then.

I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.

All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.

And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?

I've been hearing that kids do not understand files and hierarchal file systems due to cloud and iOS.

> Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)

The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.

> and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.

This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.

The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.

I believe that new to computing populations in developing countries who were also new to literacy benefited a lot because of the shift away from skeuomorphic design paradigms because those real world object choices didn't always translate.

> (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)

I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.

Attack of the clones, yes.

Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.

Brrr.

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