Made by Many, a London digital product agency, blogs on design, Apple, AI, Ruby and Go tooling, and internet-connected office projects.
HN commenters link its posts on Apple's aesthetics, the Is the Toilet Free project, and Moltar; one finds its AI essay silly.
"Apple set the bar for realistic textured apps. Developers followed."
IMHO, this was to be avoided. I think this move on Apple's part to move towards such literal skeuomorphism was a major step back. After decades of learning that literal analogies on computing devices simply doesn't work all that well, Apple decided to forget about all of that lesson learned stuff and just throw it all away.
Even Gruber can't manage to fake gushing over it
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/26/against-skeuomorphism
These themes aren’t lies. They’re not designed to help users understand how these apps work. They’re just decoration. They’re per-app branding. Apple no longer endorses system-wide visual uniformity. Special apps are supposed to look special. Why is Find My Friends wrapped in rich Corinthian leather? Because someone at Apple likes (and, sadly, if my guess is right, better said liked, past tense) how it looks.
I'd say in general the design gods are not happy with this move
http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-people/
http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy
http://kensegall.com/blog/tag/ical-address-book/
http://cushley.net/2011/07/in-depth-os-x-lion-review-part-3-new-visual-changes/
So in less than half a dozen links this design trend is called cheap "kitsch", "infantile", patronizing lies, "hideous" etc. These are not slight disagreements, these are fighting words.
I agree that Google's Android apps suffer from terrible UI…
This is a better article about skeuomorphism for those interested: http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-people/
PS - Skeuomorphism definition: "Strictly speaking it means retaining design features from earlier designs when those features previously had a specific reason for being that way, but do not any longer." - http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy
Related: http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy. This writer brings up an excellent question: for whatever reason Apple seems to think having skeuomorphic interfaces is a good idea.... so why isn't this reflected in the hardware itself? Why is the macbook/ipad not designed to look like a notepad or briefcase?
This is my take on this: uses a tagging convention on your EC2 instances. Can also run commands in parallel over a set of instances.
https://github.com/madebymany/moltar
http://madebymany.com/blog/a-little-tooling-goes-a-long-way
It correctly identified my refrigerator and bookshelf. Color me impressed.
Things like this make articles like this one seem silly: https://www.madebymany.com/stories/what-if-ai-is-a-failed-dream
ain't feedback a relic of all 'press-double-hard-to-be-sure' buttons? With handwriting recognition it shouldn't be that hard.
also, http://madebymany.com/blog/wizards-and-haptic-gestures