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Skeuomorph 2 days ago [-]
Skeuomorphs are cultural algorithms, borrowing functional forms of the past to make the new objects of similar function more comfortably familiar. The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.
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.
> The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.
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.
King-Aaron 11 hours ago [-]
I'd like to agree that it was a bit of a strange and incorrect comparison to make. Also, I may be incorrect here, but I thought skeuomorphism just refers to ornamental design cues, not functional design features.
Skeuomorph 15 hours ago [-]
But they were familiar enough with vines then leather cord then ribbing and so on.
We of course are not talking about today, we're talking about thousands of years ago, and a whole series of comfortably familiar skeuomorphic transitions. Until by now, knife handles have the obviousness they have through that heritage of iterative familiarity.
Such isn't an opinion, it's researched if you look. (Not that this user would know, of course.)
paleotrope 14 hours ago [-]
But the ribbing or texture serves an actual purpose, so it's not quite skeuomorphic. It's not pure ornamental.
andrewflnr 11 hours ago [-]
Where it exists at all. Most knives you'll actually encounter aren't ribbed at all. There are lots of ways to provide grip and all of them are used.
andrewflnr 11 hours ago [-]
The crazy thing is, you gave a perfectly good definition of skeuomorphism, then keep using the word in a different and sillier way. You're doing the same thing you accuse the video of.
elmomle 14 hours ago [-]
I want to poke at this a little. I don't think the ribs on the handle of a knife qualify as skeuomorphism, since they serve a distinct functional purpose independent of their origin (namely, better grip).
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).
gyomu 19 hours ago [-]
The voiceover in this video is in a weird uncanny valley where I don't think it's purely AI generated, but it doesn't sound 100% human either. Some sort of AI processing filter maybe? I'm not familiar with what tools are common those days.
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.
Wowfunhappy 18 hours ago [-]
> The voiceover in this video is in a weird uncanny valley where I don't think it's purely AI generated, but it doesn't sound 100% human either. Some sort of AI processing filter maybe? I'm not familiar with what tools are common those days.
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.
jcarrano 5 hours ago [-]
Optically, it looks very nice, but it kills my CPU.
thrance 16 hours ago [-]
This page is very broken for me (Firefox on Android). It looks there's some kind of Z-fighting happening on the buttons? Also, they scroll slightly faster than the rest of the page, such that when at the bottom they're completely out of their sockets.
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.
We of course are not talking about today, we're talking about thousands of years ago, and a whole series of comfortably familiar skeuomorphic transitions. Until by now, knife handles have the obviousness they have through that heritage of iterative familiarity.
Such isn't an opinion, it's researched if you look. (Not that this user would know, of course.)
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.