Via The Loop, a nice post by Louie Mantia on skeuomorphism. I’ve written in the past about Apple’s heavy use of textures on iOS, defending such decisions and also highlighting what can happen when the other extreme (over the top minimalism) is instead used.

Mantia rightly notes that a lot of what people are complaining about as ‘skeuomorphism’ is in fact simply custom textures integrated with standard interface design, because something skeuomorphic is supposed to have a connection with an older/familiar way of doing things. Therefore, a direct translation of some music hardware—knobs and all—to the iPad is clearly skeuomorphic. Find My Friends, with its leather stitching, is not, because you never used to use your leather stitched ‘thing’ to find your friends. Unless you were a serious weirdo in a leather suit, often getting arrested on ‘scaring the shit out of people’ charges.

However, the part of Mantia’s post that really struck with me was this:

More importantly, a visually distinctive app such as Game Center, Find My Friends, Podcasts, or iBooks helps you to remember which app you’re in. The colors, textures, and environment paint that picture instantly.

As I’ve said in the past, I find it strange people now see Jony Ive’s shift to looking after all of Apple’s human interface as an indication that future software will be as minimal as the hardware. If that is the case, either they don’t understand Ive or—more worryingly—Ive doesn’t understand good software design. I don’t have a problem with Apple perhaps toning down some of its excesses, but to remove every texture and all the fun from its software and head towards Office 2013-style minimalism would be the wrong decision.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with somewhat minimal design when it’s the best decision for the app in question (such as Letterpress), but as a default it would make it difficult for people to immediately know what application they are in. On OS X, people have complained enough about Apple removing colour from Finder, and removing textures entirely from iOS would be rather similar. Also, the point of iOS hardware is that it is a blank canvas—it’s designed to get out of the way and enable the device to become the application or game that is running. But in making apps extremely minimal, Apple would be in danger of painting shades of white on its blank canvas, which won’t excite anyone and would even cause minimalist advocates to rapidly start griping that iOS was now boring and less usable.

Every day, the world edges closer to becoming an episode of The Day Today, with a news cycle that is beyond satire. Today, The Register reports:

Russian Orthodox Christians have defaced the logos on Apple products because they consider the bitten Apple to be anti-Christian, says Russian news agency Interfax.

The radical Christians have replaced the Apple logo with a cross, claiming that the current Apple logo – well-known around the world and often voted one of the world’s most popular logos – symbolises the original sin of Adam and Eve and is generally insulting to the Christian faith.

The Register adds a new law is currently barrelling its way through the Russian Parliament to clamp down on religious insults, and there is speculation that

there could be commercial impact, even a sales ban, if Apple fell on the wrong side of the law.

But how would Apple fall on the wrong side of the law? In a sane world, this would be an argument about intent and not speculation, and as Apple logo designer Rob Janoff once told me in an interview:

The religious myths are just that […] there’s no ‘Eve and Garden of Eden’ and ‘bite from the fruit of knowledge’ symbolism!

Unfortunately, this no longer appears to be a sane world (if it ever was).

The Next Web reports for Instagram that times are a-changing. There are essentially two kinds of app in Instagram’s ‘add a pretty filter’ space:

• Highly entertaining apps that evoke old-school instant camera charm by live-applying a filter, so you can see what you’re going to get. This is Instagram today.
• Hum-drum apps where you take a photo in a normal, boring way and then spend several days arsing about with countless filters, before more or less choosing one at random, because the alternative is starving to death with a smartphone in your hand, which would be really dumb. This is Instagram tomorrow.

The m0st astonishing aspect of this story comes from Instagram itself, via the known issues site.

As of the current release (v3.1), Instagram does not support live filters on the iPhone 5. Going forward, live filters will be phased out as we work to improve the Instagram experience for all users.

That last sentence is very important and warrants breaking up into chunks:

as we work to improve the Instagram experience

What? How are you improving the Instagram experience by removing something that is core to the Instagram experience?

for all users.

Oh. So Instagram’s boarded the lowest-common denominator train. Next stop: Shitappsville.

UPDATE: Ha! So, on Twitter the response has been split between “Instagram are idiots” and “I never even knew live filters existed”, so perhaps this is also a case of Instagram stamping on a tricky engineering problem related to a feature not used by enough people for them to think it matters. (That said, Android users have responded, grumbling that they’d really like live filters.) Regardless, it’s still a pity to see an app that’s like a ton of point-and-clicks in your pocket get downgraded to one of a billion apply-a-filter-later apps welded to a social network.

One of the things that currently annoys a lot of people about Apple is the way in which it constantly builds apps that resemble real-world items. iBooks has a background that resembles an open book, and Apple’s calendaring apps have leather stitching and torn paper at the top. In some cases, such design merely irks designers who like the minimalism Apple showcases in its hardware; occasionally, though, usability suffers. For example, the iBooks background never changes, and so while you can instinctively look at a real book and see how much is left to go, iBooks doesn’t help in this way; worse, Address Book for OS X apes a real book and ends up a total mess that’s far slower to work with than its predecessor.

Of late, a lot of people have been pointing to Microsoft as the superior company when it comes to interface design, citing the mostly very smart Windows 7 and Windows 8. The problem is, not all interface design scales, and when you go very minimal, interfaces can lose any sense of tactility and make it hard to focus. Peter Bright of Ars Technica’s shot of Office 2013 highlights that the opposite of Apple’s current design aesthetic isn’t necessarily any better. Acres of white space lead the eye to flick all over the design, making it hard to focus on the content (which is the smallish box on the right, with “This is an inline reply” in it). It’s unclear which components are buttons and which are content areas. Worse, there’s no sense of warmth at all. This feels like an email client designed to appeal to people bereft of emotion. In short, it’s every bit as horrible as Apple’s worst UI design, just in a very different way.

You might have noticed that Jony Ive recently got knighted, and he spoke to the Telegraph about all things design. Naturally, he was asked about Apple’s software design, including iCal’s nasty stitched UI. He apparently winced a bit, but diplomatically offered the following quote:

My focus is very much working with the other teams on the product ideas and then developing the hardware and so that’s our focus and that’s our responsibility. In terms of those elements you’re talking about, I’m not really connected to that.

Initially, this seems surprising—Apple’s hardware and software people being so separate. However, the perceived clash between Apple’s minimal hardware and increasingly ‘real world’ software interfaces actually stem from the same foundation of usability. In other words, both methodologies are designed to make things easier for users—the hardware should get out of the way, and the software should be welcoming, intuitive and, where possible, familiar. Apple certainly doesn’t always succeed in terms of software UI design, but in aping real-world items, it often gives users a head-start they wouldn’t otherwise have (while simultaneously typically infuriating tech-savvy users).

Quite how Jesus Diaz extrapolated this into What Jony Ive Wishes He Could Say About Apple’s User Interfaces, I don’t know. There’s quite a lot of projection within his piece, and he bangs on about the usual things people (including myself) have banged on about in the past, but it’s clear Apple has fairly set thinking regarding software interfaces, and it’s not about to follow Microsoft down the path of UI minimalism. Sales figures suggest the company’s right, but the way things are—and Ive’s quote—doesn’t suggest Ive himself wants to kick Scott Forstall in the face. It just suggests that Apple’s got what the company perceives as the right person on hardware and the right person on software.