...which, to be fair, helped give us the President under whom, for example, the murders in the "Collateral Murder" videos took place.
and when things get really bad in the US, the ability to say "peace out bitches"
How does Texas have that ability any more than any other location? (Certainly not in law; they tried that once, along with some others, and it didn't exactly go smoothly for them. The Annexation of Texas Joint Resolution of Congress March 1, 1845 just says Texas can carve up to four additional states out of its territory:
Third, New States, of convenient size, not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas, and having sufficient population, may hereafter, by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the federal constitution.
Yes, on behalf of we the people. But who is "created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights?" All men. The US Constitution is an expansive and radical document...
The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party
Obama is the President of the United States, having been elected as the candidate of the Democratic Party. That isn't the same as "head of the Democratic Party", in any sense in which he dictates what the Democratic members of the House of Representatives and Senate do. I'm not sure who would count as the "head of the Democratic Party" - or the "head of the Republican Party", for that matter; head of the national committee?
So he doesn't deserve the sole blame for the PATRIOT Act not being repealed; he could have proposed a bill to do so and lobbied the Democrats in Congress to introduce it, but didn't, so he deserves some blame, but the Democratic leadership in Congress could have written and introduced the bill themselves, but didn't, so they deserve some of the blame.
I.e., phrasing it as
They could have repealed the PATRIOT ACT; they chose not to.
Err, let me guess - natural lambskin condoms?...not sure if that's plumbing the depths of gross, or the idea for one hell of a new haute cuisine dish for 'Bizarre Foods'.
OK, what are lambskin condoms made from? At least if Wikipedia is to be believed, it's sheep intestines.
And what are sausages stuffed into? At least if Wikipedia is to be believed, some sausage casings are made from parts of sheep intestines.
Of course it does, which is why most companies make you sign non-compete agreements when they hire you. I'm not sure of California's rules on non-competes
Maybe windows metro style looks less decorated than OSX, but when you try to configure the wireless you will live hell on earth.
And the skeuomorphism in the OS X "Network" System Preference item is? Does the "Create a computer-to-computer network" dialog (at least on Mountain Lion, select "Create network..." from the drop-down menu for the Wi-Fi icon) have a radio dial or radio push-buttons to set the 802.11 channel, or does it have a Boring Old Option Menu? (Hint: the answers are "nowhere" and "Boring Old Option Menu".)
Of course abusing of skeuomorphism is not a good idea
Which is exactly the point of The Fine Article; it's not saying "everything Apple have ever done is bad, and everything about Metro is better", it's saying "Apple's recent increase on skeuomorphism is over the top, and, at least from a pure visual design standpoint, Metro might be better".
As a followup to your post noted, that is a false statement, unless "would" is subjunctive in that claim and you failed to indicate what needs to change in order to make it true.
Apple needs to just change shit! So what if it is working fine. Old people need to FOAD.
Are you referring to the old people for whom contrast is a good thing, so that black-on-light-gray works better than black-on-fake-brown-leather? (Oh, and Gramps's old desktop calendar didn't have a "+" button to let them write something in one of the month boxes, or arrow buttons to turn the pages; I'm rather skeptical that a little bit of fake-leather-and-torn-paper frippery is going to magically make the difference between "Gramps doesn't get it" and "Gramps gets it" there.)
http://skeu.it/ has some cracking examples and a good bit of snark to boot.
Thank you. That site made my day. This one is a true gem - "who cares whether it's hard to read the labels on the "buttons", or if the objects on which the labels were put have fuck all to do with the function of the button, it's so cool and pretty to make the "Everyone" button a water bottle and the "Debuts" button a pair of sneakers and..." There's also "This only makes sense if the app ACTUALLY CONTROLS THE WEATHER".
You could, but the point I was making is that by sharing a design theme, it becomes more obvious that data is shared between the apps. It's essentially making the point "this is the same app". Sure you could do that without using stitched leather, but you'd need some other way of visually tying the apps together. It just happens that Apple went with stitched leather.
How about "by showing a choice of a month-at-a-glance, week-at-a-glance, or day-at-a-glance view, and calling it "Calendar" on all the platforms"?
I think adopting a visual identity that reduces contrast can make an app less fun to use.
We disagree;^)
I'm glad for you that your eyes are young and fresh enough that you don't miss the extra contrast of black-on-light-gray relative to black-on-brown. That may, or may not, continue to be true in the future.
Now... it sounds like the argument being made is "Yeah, yeah... but those days of the never-bought-a-computer consumers are over. Now that we've got them on-board, let's start cutting those ties to meatspace".
Actually, at least for OS X, the argument is "why are you introducing ties to meatspace that weren't there before?" Prior to Lion, iCal didn't have fake leather and fake page tears and Address Book didn't try to pretend it was a real book. And the same might apply to iOS as well - the iPhone versions of apps don't have much in the way of skeuomorphisms, so maybe they were introduced in the iPad. The latter sounds a bit like a case of "because we can" rather than "because we should".
Nowadays, however, when I play with my iPhone or iPad, I find all of the real-world metaphors in the UI to be very heartwarming. The stitching on the leather in the Notes app...
When I use Notes on my iPhone, I don't see any stitching. Was that introduced after iOS 3, or is it another iPad-only skeuomorphism?
Skeumorphs may hamper readability. That is a legitimate complaint. Well no one knows what a Rolodex looks like isn't really one to me.
Emulating something with which most of the user base is unfamiliar isn't bad, but it does make the "skeuomorphisms are good because they make people comfortable with the new device" argument rather weak for that particular skeuomorphism. Time and energy spent making a contacts app look like a Rolodex is time and energy not spent adding useful functionality to the app or fixing bugs in the app, so the skeuomorphisms may have to justify their existence with more than "because we can".
Because their mobile phone, which doesn't, as far as I know, have stitched fucking leather in its calendar app and doesn't make its contacts list look like a fucking book, is a big success? At least according to this chart, almost half of the revenue still comes from a machine too small for twee skeuomorphisms - and, except in 2012, the "Portables" and "Desktops" lines didn't have them, either.
I was kind of opposed to the "tabletization" of OS X in the beginning, but now that I have used Mountain Lion for several weeks I have to say that it is a great idea. I enjoy Launchpad and the Notification Center a lot. Notes and Mail that behave exactly like my iPhone is a big plus,
...as is the ability for those of us for whom the Boring Old Layout works better to continue to use the "classic" layout for Mail.
Notes as a separate app rather than a part of Mail makes sense; it wasn't clear to me why it was part of Mail in the first place.
I really should mention Mail since I really thought that e-mail clients kind of hit a ceiling and that program proved me wrong.
For me, it's a bit of a "meh"..Mail looks as if it might be interesting, though.
There is no way to run an emulated OSX 10.2 or similar that I know of in a Mac.
You can run Leopard or Snow Leopard Server inside VMware Fusion, but that's a bit costly.
So Apple skeuomorphs don't let you hyperlink on their calendar app.
Fortunately, Apple didn't fuck up the calendar app that badly.
Reel-toReel tapes don't allow skipping direct, so the skeuomorphs don't let you skip.
Far far too many UIs ape the "real world" item so closely they throw out the benefits of not having to build the damn thing out of real materials.
That is the unforgivable sin in skeuomorphism; if you impose upon the object the limitations of the imitated object, when the imitating object's object doesn't inherently have the same limitation, you've fucked up massively. Address Book in Lion and Contacts in Mountain Lion both commit that sin.
I think these are opinions in taste more than anything else. A calendar has leather cover. So what? It it was bland and gray,
No, it was black-on-light gray for the buttons in the title bar, which had a bit more contrast than gray-on-leather-brown, so the buttons were a bit more readable.
is there a huge problem in how the user interacts with it?
No, but it is a minor problem (and might be a more major problem for those with eyes even older than mine).
The skeuomorphism is mostly on in the iOS environment. I haven't seen any examples of it in Lion,
You've never used Address Book in Lion? That's what I, at least, consider the worst skeuomorphism in OS X - by trying to make it look like a book, not only does it glop up the aesthetics of the app, it screws up the functionality of the app, by not allowing the 3-pane view earlier versions had (with a pane of all the groups of items you set up, a pane of the contents of the currently selected group, and a pane of the currently selected item), presumably because, well, an actual book can only show you two pages at a time and by, rather than letting you "swipe to turn pages" to switch between "pane of the groups and pane of the contents of the group" and "pane of the contents of the group and pane of the currently selected item", goes arguably un-skeuomorphic by having you switch between them by clicking on a bookmark ribbon the end of which appears at the top of the page, which is truly spectacularly stoopid.
iCal didn't directly mess up the functionality with its skeuomorphisms, although having the title bar be black on light-brown-leather color it reduced the contrast making it a bit less readable - then again, "let's make the UI less readable by reducing contrast" was a bit of a common theme of Lion....
perhaps there are some in Mountain Lion, I don't know.
Mountain Lion undoes the "no 3-pane view" in Address Book (and changes the name to Contacts, raising the question of why it still looks like a book...), but as the first two panes are on the "left-hand page" and the third pane is on the "right-hand page", the third pane is forced to be the same width as the sum of the widths of the first and second pane, even if that makes it wider than it needs to be. It makes no change to the skeuomorphisms of iCal (now named Calendar).
Rule Number 1 of skeuomorphism - do NOT impose on the object in question the limitations of the imitated object merely to preserve the illusion. Anybody who does that should be banned from doing any further UI design without adult supervision until they demonstrate that they've managed to acquire a clue.
The emotional reaction is exactly what Apple advertises to. It's intentional to trigger that particular area of your brain.
Presumably it triggers more "yay, Apple!" responses than "fuck Apple!" responses among the population in general, or they shouldn't be doing it. On discussion forums, it triggers an SI fuckload of both.
I think you will find the point is that Intel/Microsoft are int he middle of making big things about the power efficiency of Windows 8, whereas they are playing catchup in a lot of areas with Linux, for which Intel currently say they will not release the same information on Haswell that they have given Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to Texas....
...which, to be fair, helped give us the President under whom, for example, the murders in the "Collateral Murder" videos took place.
and when things get really bad in the US, the ability to say "peace out bitches"
How does Texas have that ability any more than any other location? (Certainly not in law; they tried that once, along with some others, and it didn't exactly go smoothly for them. The Annexation of Texas Joint Resolution of Congress March 1, 1845 just says Texas can carve up to four additional states out of its territory:
if they want to.)
Yes, on behalf of we the people. But who is "created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights?" All men. The US Constitution is an expansive and radical document...
...that, as noted in another reply to your posting, contains neither of those phrases.
In fact, it also says the President can order the execution of said citizen without benefit of trial.
Assange is not a US citizen.
Which makes it even easier.
The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party
Obama is the President of the United States, having been elected as the candidate of the Democratic Party. That isn't the same as "head of the Democratic Party", in any sense in which he dictates what the Democratic members of the House of Representatives and Senate do. I'm not sure who would count as the "head of the Democratic Party" - or the "head of the Republican Party", for that matter; head of the national committee?
So he doesn't deserve the sole blame for the PATRIOT Act not being repealed; he could have proposed a bill to do so and lobbied the Democrats in Congress to introduce it, but didn't, so he deserves some blame, but the Democratic leadership in Congress could have written and introduced the bill themselves, but didn't, so they deserve some of the blame.
I.e., phrasing it as
(emphasis mine) as you did is correct.
That's awesome - I never heard of it before. I might try to start using the phrase :)
For a bigger dose of Mr. Geisel's non-children's-book work, see The Advertising Work of Dr. Seuss and Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons.
Mine's too old for that book now, too.
How about "Quick Henry the Flit!"?
OK, what are lambskin condoms made from? At least if Wikipedia is to be believed, it's sheep intestines.
Grr. How did I manage to get that wrong? Let's try that again:
...At least if Wikipedia is to be believed...
Err, let me guess - natural lambskin condoms? ...not sure if that's plumbing the depths of gross, or the idea for one hell of a new haute cuisine dish for 'Bizarre Foods'.
OK, what are lambskin condoms made from? At least if Wikipedia is to be believed, it's sheep intestines.
And what are sausages stuffed into? At least if Wikipedia is to be believed, some sausage casings are made from parts of sheep intestines.
"GIR, quickly! Ride the pig!"
I see what you did there....
Of course it does, which is why most companies make you sign non-compete agreements when they hire you. I'm not sure of California's rules on non-competes
At least as of 2008, they had no legal standing, with some narrow exceptions (Edwards v. Arthur Anderson LLP).
Maybe windows metro style looks less decorated than OSX, but when you try to configure the wireless you will live hell on earth.
And the skeuomorphism in the OS X "Network" System Preference item is? Does the "Create a computer-to-computer network" dialog (at least on Mountain Lion, select "Create network..." from the drop-down menu for the Wi-Fi icon) have a radio dial or radio push-buttons to set the 802.11 channel, or does it have a Boring Old Option Menu? (Hint: the answers are "nowhere" and "Boring Old Option Menu".)
Of course abusing of skeuomorphism is not a good idea
Which is exactly the point of The Fine Article; it's not saying "everything Apple have ever done is bad, and everything about Metro is better", it's saying "Apple's recent increase on skeuomorphism is over the top, and, at least from a pure visual design standpoint, Metro might be better".
Every country has enumerated highways if it has highways,
Presumably by "enumerated" you mean "labeled with an alphanumeric label", given that if you mean "given a pure number" you are mistaken (and, yes, the letters are used on the signs).
Anyone would know it's a highway sign.
As a followup to your post noted, that is a false statement, unless "would" is subjunctive in that claim and you failed to indicate what needs to change in order to make it true.
Apple needs to just change shit! So what if it is working fine. Old people need to FOAD.
Are you referring to the old people for whom contrast is a good thing, so that black-on-light-gray works better than black-on-fake-brown-leather? (Oh, and Gramps's old desktop calendar didn't have a "+" button to let them write something in one of the month boxes, or arrow buttons to turn the pages; I'm rather skeptical that a little bit of fake-leather-and-torn-paper frippery is going to magically make the difference between "Gramps doesn't get it" and "Gramps gets it" there.)
http://skeu.it/ has some cracking examples and a good bit of snark to boot.
Thank you. That site made my day. This one is a true gem - "who cares whether it's hard to read the labels on the "buttons", or if the objects on which the labels were put have fuck all to do with the function of the button, it's so cool and pretty to make the "Everyone" button a water bottle and the "Debuts" button a pair of sneakers and..." There's also "This only makes sense if the app ACTUALLY CONTROLS THE WEATHER".
You could, but the point I was making is that by sharing a design theme, it becomes more obvious that data is shared between the apps. It's essentially making the point "this is the same app". Sure you could do that without using stitched leather, but you'd need some other way of visually tying the apps together. It just happens that Apple went with stitched leather.
How about "by showing a choice of a month-at-a-glance, week-at-a-glance, or day-at-a-glance view, and calling it "Calendar" on all the platforms"?
I think adopting a visual identity that reduces contrast can make an app less fun to use.
We disagree ;^)
I'm glad for you that your eyes are young and fresh enough that you don't miss the extra contrast of black-on-light-gray relative to black-on-brown. That may, or may not, continue to be true in the future.
Now... it sounds like the argument being made is "Yeah, yeah... but those days of the never-bought-a-computer consumers are over. Now that we've got them on-board, let's start cutting those ties to meatspace".
Actually, at least for OS X, the argument is "why are you introducing ties to meatspace that weren't there before?" Prior to Lion, iCal didn't have fake leather and fake page tears and Address Book didn't try to pretend it was a real book. And the same might apply to iOS as well - the iPhone versions of apps don't have much in the way of skeuomorphisms, so maybe they were introduced in the iPad. The latter sounds a bit like a case of "because we can" rather than "because we should".
Nowadays, however, when I play with my iPhone or iPad, I find all of the real-world metaphors in the UI to be very heartwarming. The stitching on the leather in the Notes app...
When I use Notes on my iPhone, I don't see any stitching. Was that introduced after iOS 3, or is it another iPad-only skeuomorphism?
Skeumorphs may hamper readability. That is a legitimate complaint. Well no one knows what a Rolodex looks like isn't really one to me.
Emulating something with which most of the user base is unfamiliar isn't bad, but it does make the "skeuomorphisms are good because they make people comfortable with the new device" argument rather weak for that particular skeuomorphism. Time and energy spent making a contacts app look like a Rolodex is time and energy not spent adding useful functionality to the app or fixing bugs in the app, so the skeuomorphisms may have to justify their existence with more than "because we can".
Why?
Because their mobile phone, which doesn't, as far as I know, have stitched fucking leather in its calendar app and doesn't make its contacts list look like a fucking book, is a big success? At least according to this chart, almost half of the revenue still comes from a machine too small for twee skeuomorphisms - and, except in 2012, the "Portables" and "Desktops" lines didn't have them, either.
And by using the same stitched leather across the iPhone, iPad and Mac version of the calendar app,
So does the Calendar app in iOS > 3 use stitched leather on the iPhone? It sure doesn't do so on iOS 3.
it emphasises that the data you put in is shared between these apps.
You could also do that by omitting the stitched leather across all three versions of the app. I'd vote for that solution instead.
I also think that having a strong visual identity for an app can make it more fun to look at and use, if that's your thing.
I think adopting a visual identity that reduces contrast can make an app less fun to use.
I was kind of opposed to the "tabletization" of OS X in the beginning, but now that I have used Mountain Lion for several weeks I have to say that it is a great idea. I enjoy Launchpad and the Notification Center a lot. Notes and Mail that behave exactly like my iPhone is a big plus,
...as is the ability for those of us for whom the Boring Old Layout works better to continue to use the "classic" layout for Mail.
Notes as a separate app rather than a part of Mail makes sense; it wasn't clear to me why it was part of Mail in the first place.
I really should mention Mail since I really thought that e-mail clients kind of hit a ceiling and that program proved me wrong.
For me, it's a bit of a "meh". .Mail looks as if it might be interesting, though.
There is no way to run an emulated OSX 10.2 or similar that I know of in a Mac.
You can run Leopard or Snow Leopard Server inside VMware Fusion, but that's a bit costly.
So many things to criticize about Apple's UI direction (the tabletization of OS X, for example), and they criticize the thing Apple is doing right.
People like old fashioned aesthetics.
Some people might like old-fashioned aesthetics in some situations.
Nobody had a need to use a sundial these days, but many people still decorate their yards with them.
Yeah, but do they tell time with them?
So Apple skeuomorphs don't let you hyperlink on their calendar app.
Fortunately, Apple didn't fuck up the calendar app that badly.
Reel-toReel tapes don't allow skipping direct, so the skeuomorphs don't let you skip.
Far far too many UIs ape the "real world" item so closely they throw out the benefits of not having to build the damn thing out of real materials.
That is the unforgivable sin in skeuomorphism; if you impose upon the object the limitations of the imitated object, when the imitating object's object doesn't inherently have the same limitation, you've fucked up massively. Address Book in Lion and Contacts in Mountain Lion both commit that sin.
I think these are opinions in taste more than anything else. A calendar has leather cover. So what? It it was bland and gray,
No, it was black-on-light gray for the buttons in the title bar, which had a bit more contrast than gray-on-leather-brown, so the buttons were a bit more readable.
is there a huge problem in how the user interacts with it?
No, but it is a minor problem (and might be a more major problem for those with eyes even older than mine).
The skeuomorphism is mostly on in the iOS environment. I haven't seen any examples of it in Lion,
You've never used Address Book in Lion? That's what I, at least, consider the worst skeuomorphism in OS X - by trying to make it look like a book, not only does it glop up the aesthetics of the app, it screws up the functionality of the app, by not allowing the 3-pane view earlier versions had (with a pane of all the groups of items you set up, a pane of the contents of the currently selected group, and a pane of the currently selected item), presumably because, well, an actual book can only show you two pages at a time and by, rather than letting you "swipe to turn pages" to switch between "pane of the groups and pane of the contents of the group" and "pane of the contents of the group and pane of the currently selected item", goes arguably un-skeuomorphic by having you switch between them by clicking on a bookmark ribbon the end of which appears at the top of the page, which is truly spectacularly stoopid.
iCal didn't directly mess up the functionality with its skeuomorphisms, although having the title bar be black on light-brown-leather color it reduced the contrast making it a bit less readable - then again, "let's make the UI less readable by reducing contrast" was a bit of a common theme of Lion....
perhaps there are some in Mountain Lion, I don't know.
Mountain Lion undoes the "no 3-pane view" in Address Book (and changes the name to Contacts, raising the question of why it still looks like a book...), but as the first two panes are on the "left-hand page" and the third pane is on the "right-hand page", the third pane is forced to be the same width as the sum of the widths of the first and second pane, even if that makes it wider than it needs to be. It makes no change to the skeuomorphisms of iCal (now named Calendar).
Rule Number 1 of skeuomorphism - do NOT impose on the object in question the limitations of the imitated object merely to preserve the illusion. Anybody who does that should be banned from doing any further UI design without adult supervision until they demonstrate that they've managed to acquire a clue.
The emotional reaction is exactly what Apple advertises to. It's intentional to trigger that particular area of your brain.
Presumably it triggers more "yay, Apple!" responses than "fuck Apple!" responses among the population in general, or they shouldn't be doing it. On discussion forums, it triggers an SI fuckload of both.
I think you will find the point is that Intel/Microsoft are int he middle of making big things about the power efficiency of Windows 8, whereas they are playing catchup in a lot of areas with Linux, for which Intel currently say they will not release the same information on Haswell that they have given Microsoft.
Explicitly, or is that an inference from various things Intel have publicly said and been claimed to say about Clover Trail and the Intel presentation talking about both Haswell and Clover Trail power-saving features? If so, note also that Intel have been claimed to say that "There is no fundamental barrier to supporting Linux on Clover Trail since it utilizes Intel architecture cores, we are simply focusing our current efforts for this Clover Trail product on Windows 8.", so I'm a little loath to assume what the truth is at this point.