One of the things that bugs me about iOS is Apple’s real-world design. It makes some of its apps akin to real-world items, and so you get a leather-bound calendar for iCal or a virtual book for iBooks. The idea is to presumably assist people in how to use something by providing something they recognise.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really work. Virtual items with virtual controls don’t perform like their real-world counterparts. You don’t have a scrolling panel in a real calendar, for example. The design often doesn’t follow through to the details either, which is particularly apparent in iBooks. That app sits its ebooks on top of an image of an open book, but the image never changes as you read, never updating the number of pages beneath the one(s) you’re viewing. Therefore, what could potentially have been a useful indicator of where you are in any particular volume becomes detrimental (because the eye makes the assumption you’re not making progress, and iBooks then has to provide an alternate—software-oriented—progress bar), and iBooks therefore manages to feel less book-like than Kindle. Amazon, of course, does away with design garbage, instead just giving you the content and a few ways to adjust how it looks (in terms of font styles).

A further problem is addressed by Ben Brooks at The Brooks Review. In Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces, he talks about how instead of realism, software designers should be striving to take full advantage of the power of computers, providing new solutions to problems, rather than aping ones built in the real world decades ago.

Ask any person who has used Soulver for Mac or iOS if they think Soulver was difficult to figure out—it is leaps and bounds better than any other calculator app, yet it doesn’t look like any other calculator app. It took me all of two minutes to figure out how to work the app and to realize just how much better it is. What Soulver did was not try to replicate the beloved HP 12c, instead they rethought what a calculator app was to be—and how it should be designed if it is only made for use on a computer, from day one.

It is what calculators would have been if they were invented at the same time computers were, instead of what we have with most calculator apps.

I totally agree with this. Soulver is a fantastic app, like a ‘back of an envelope’ that does the sums for you. Instead of being a virtual calculator, it’s a little bit spreadsheet, a little bit text editor, and quite a bit of power under the hood that you can choose to use or not. If you’re a beginner, you can simply paste lists of values (such as a shopping list of items and prices) from emails and other documents into the main pane and it’ll work out a total (without you having to laboriously remove related text, which also removes the context from your calculations). If you’re happy going deeper, you can work with operators, currency conversion, and mathematical functions. You might argue that Soulver lacks that initial point of recognition (“This is a calculator?”), but it enables you to do commonplace calculations a lot more quickly than you can in typical calculator apps for Windows, Mac and iOS.

In a related article, Brooks also looks into iCal and its resolute desire to stick with real-world conventions and simulated paper, rather than rolling in more dynamic design ideas from GTD apps that would benefit everyone. Given the absolutely hideous iCal UI (Ars Technica) in one of the latest Lion builds, I don’t suspect anyone at Apple shares Brooks’s opinion, nor his taste.

(One possibility, of course, is perhaps the design is intentionally hideous. There’s a full-screen button on the new iCal, to make it a proper full-screen app, in the same manner as iPhoto ’11. If people are so offended and distracted by the torn paper and horrible fake-leather toolbar, perhaps they’ll be more likely to explore the new mode.)