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Comment by overshard | Hacker News Reader

This is cool from a programming perspective but it is poor UX. I believe everyone on HN knows this but the problem area are my clients. They run across stuff like this and think it looks cool/fun. Instead of listening to reason they demand stuff like this and end up with bad websites because all I can do it advise them but then make what they want.

Please stop spreading bad UX, leave page flipping to actual pages/paper.

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The focus of this experiment isn't so much proposing new UX that we think should be adopted. More so, this experiment is to showcase what is now possible using the newest HTML5 features - to provide inspiration for those trying to implement novel HTML5 animations. A page flip allowed us to show off some of my favorite new HTML5 effects.

Agreed. HN loves to criticize Apple for forcing their UIs to mimic real-life (think Newsstand, leather stitching, etc), but still considers things like this desirable.

From a technical perspective, it's cool. Please don't use this on real sites!

The whole "Apple's skeuomorphism is bad" meme was blown out of proportion. Hundreds of millions of people use bloody DVD/Video/Music player UIs that resemble in tiny detail AND behavior an actual dvd/cd player for no good reason, and then complain about the "leather stitching" on iCal, which is a purely _cosmetic_ addition.

The BAD kind of skeuomorphism is mimicking real life object behavior, when a different approach is both possible and more easy to use in software. That is, UIs like this:

http://codecpack.co/images/BlazeDVD.jpg

It has nothing to do about having faux-leather on your background.

Page flipping, which Apple uses in iBooks, is such an example of bad sceuomorphism.

But most other Apple's sceuomorphism criticism is about irrelevant fad designer preferences for clear-cut modernist LOOKS (e.g Metro style, flat etc). Those things are fads, and come and go. The same guys were all over "lickable interfaces, drop shadows, embossed elements, etc" a few years back. Actually, circa 2005-7, it was a whole movement of developers using such visual sceuomorphic and ornamental details, named the "Delicious Generation".

To see that the LOOK part of design (and not behavior, e.g look&feel) is all about fads, consider the case of Jonathan Ives again. The same "minimal, aluminum+glass" guy, was the one who designed the flower-power iMac back in the day:

http://www.giantmike.com/articles/picts/flowerpower.jpg ).

>HN loves to criticize Apple for forcing their UIs to mimic real-life (think Newsstand, leather stitching, etc)

Ornament does not impact usability. In your two listed examples, they do not influence how the user interacts with the software.

This page flip is an example of mimicking real-world interaction and not just appearance.

Agreed, I spent 10 seconds trying to figure out how to turn the page. At a minimum there should be arrow buttons that trigger the fancy page flip animation.

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