The Skeuomorphism Nobody Talks About [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Apple's felt or leather served no functional purpose. They are faux realism, not skeuomorphism. Similarly, a digitally simulated voltmeter is not skeuomorphic, it is not a new object made familiar by borrowing a past form. It's just a digital replica.
Meanwhile, buttons with drop shadows, buttons that appear to depress complete with haptic feedback, are skeuomorphic. Apple Notes being yellow lined note paper could be called skeumorphic. And certainly, the rolodex tabs for letter groups in Contacts were clearly skeuomorphic.
This is an interesting video, and it initially defines the term correctly, but then incorrectly buckets many things as skeuomorphic to make a point, when in fact the objected to them tended to be they were not skeuomorphic at all.
Borrowing functional forms of the past to make new affordances comfortable and familiar, given them the right feel in your use, remains a good idea, at least for a transitional time.
What? No. None of that. Even if vines wrapped around a sharp stone were ever common, no one alive today (outside an uncontacted tribe maybe) is "familiar" enough with them to make a difference.
Texturing handles is just an obvious mechanical thing to increase grip that probably gets invented every time someone makes a handle from a smooth material.
I do agree that "leather for every app" starts to deviate away from the definition of a true skeuomorph. One could argue that the iPhone was trying to evoke the personal organizer of yesteryear, and therein lies the skeuomorphism, but since the functionality of an iPhone was so much broader than a personal organizer, it may be conceptual smear to call that skeuomorphism too (but I still think a good argument could be made that it is skeuomorphism, since the functional form of a prior design is still being evoked intentionally for aesthetic / emotional cueing purposes).
Eg at 00:30, for a few seconds there's a marked difference in how the speech sounds - like the filter is turned off or something.
I think the video also mixes things up a bit. For example it compares the skeuomorphism of "Find my Friends" with that of a car maintenance training program - but the latter isn't an example of a skeuomorph ("a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original"), it merely adopts a realistic graphic design style to mirror the operation it's depicting.
What?! Your AI detector is way too sensitive, that's a human narrator with a natural accent.
I can hear what might be a slight editing artifact at 0:30, likely the result of using a different microphone or some such.
(I mean, I guess I can't state things like this with certainty anymore. Feel free to prove me wrong. But I'll be extremely surprised if I'm wrong.)
But the intense latency and low framerate feel makes it nearly unusable for me I'm afraid. And I'm trying on a powerful workstation. There are some fundamental performance issues in this implementation.
I could see it being intentional too, to add a sensation of weight? If that's the case, that's a good idea, but the current implementation feels more laggy than weighty.