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.

It’s hard to expect too much from a TechCrunch op-ed, but there’s no denying this headline grabbed my attention: The Post Post-PC Era: Will Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon Or Microsoft Win? I wasn’t expecting answers—I’m not crazy—but I was expecting at least a slice of BWUH? from former something or other for Oracle, Peter Relan.

To be fair to Relan, he doesn’t spend his entire time frothing at the mouth over Android marketshare, nor suggesting that Tim Cook should set fire to his eyebrows and let Jony Ive run the Cupertino show. However, he does smack into a wall when trying to predict the ‘winner’ in tablet device distribution channels:

Though Apple owns the market now, Samsung will likely push ahead since the brand seems to be out-innovating Cupertino and may continue to do so on tablets.

That’s a pretty vague statement. Out-innovating Apple how, exactly? Is this a general claim, in which case it’s pretty difficult for Samsung to out-innovate Apple without some kind of time machine, where its designers can scoot back into the past and come out with its iOS device clones before Apple even releases its own products. (Hint to Samsung: Apple’s Time Machine is merely back-up software, not an actual time machine. You’ll have to look elsewhere or, heaven forbid, actually invent one of your own.)

If we’re talking strict distribution channels, I also fail to see where Samsung is out-innovating Apple. It’s certainly out-spending Apple, and it’s also out-flinging-stuff-at-walls-and-seeing-what-sticks-ing Apple, through selling approximately eight billion different devices. This potentially gives Samsung more widespread distribution in certain markets simply through being (in some cases) cheaper—a race-to-the-bottom that’s worked so well in the PC industry. By contrast, the iPad’s available in Apple’s growing number of genuinely innovative stores, along with being possible to buy from countless other stores worldwide. There’s also now the iPad mini, grabbing a chunk of the lower end of the market.

Still, perhaps Relan is right and Samsung will soon truly out-innovate Apple—once Apple releases something new and innovative that Samsung can innovate from in an innovative fashion.

In an earlier post today, I suggest Nintendo could be another Sega fairly soon, offering its IP on the App Store. Tap! deputy editor Matthew Bolton (who knows more than a bit about gaming), countered on Twitter:

I’m not so sure about Mario on [the] App Store. Nintendo’s technical meticulousness in Mario is unparalleled outside of racers… the controls’ responsiveness is tuned to perfection, and touchscreens are laggy. It’s an Apple situation

I agree. Touchscreens are fantastic for certain types of gaming, but not Mario-style platformers. (That’s not to say there aren’t decent 2D platformers for iOS, but they certainly don’t match Super Mario in terms of, as Matt put it, ‘technical meticulousness’.) But there is a solution: a third-party controller.

It’s not like such a thing is without precedent: I’ve written about iOS games controllers before, and although they’re something of a niche, Nintendo has the hardware savvy to produce such a thing, and the IP clout to encourage plenty of people to buy it. Of course, the company would lose control elsewhere, notably in terms of device hardware. But if Nintendo’s forced into a Sega-like position, its games on the App Store and a Nintendo controller doesn’t seem like the worst alternative.

I’ve written about Nintendo before. I used to be a huge fan of Nintendo in mobile, from the original Game Boy through to the DS. However, from the GBA onwards, I noticed a pattern, in that I’d increasingly end up noodling about with homebrew and emulators, through first-party games slowing to a trickle of recycled content, and third-party games largely being expensive crap. iOS then spoiled me. In just a few years, Apple’s hardware went from being quite interesting to utterly essential for anyone with a genuine interest in gaming. It reinvigorated the indie space on mobile, forced innovation through its lack of traditional controls, and although there was a gatekeeper, it was one that was far more likely to fling you the keys to the store than Nintendo or Sony.

Every quarter, we now hear some kind of bad news from Nintendo: its hardware isn’t selling as well as it hoped, and the profits the company is making aren’t high enough (or, in some cases, don’t exist at all). Marco Arment recently covered the various options for Nintendo, and his conclusion was much the same as what I said last summer: Nintendo cannot or will not deal with the challenges required to truly compete in the existing mobile marketplace, and there’s a good chance we’ll see the company exit hardware and become another Sega.

Arment’s final words, however, were particularly interesting:

I don’t think Nintendo has a bright future. I see them staying in the shrinking hardware business until the bitter end, and then becoming roughly like Sega today: a shell of the former company, probably acquired for relatively little by someone big, endlessly whoring out their old franchises in mostly mediocre games that will leave their old fans longing for the good old days.

To some extent, “endlessly whoring out their old franchises” is precisely what Nintendo’s business model on mobile has been for years. New console? Quick: crank out another Mario Bros. platformer that’s almost identical to the last! Rinse and repeat. Still, as the company responsible for so much innovation to mobile gaming with the DS, I’d like to think Nintendo has something brewing—something amazing that will kickstart its fortunes on mobile again. However, I’m not going to be shocked if we see an official Super Mario for iPhone on the App Store for $9.99 in a year or two.

Rob Griffiths recently penned a piece for Macworld, grumbling about Mountain Lion. He tore into two aspects of the OS: Apple’s tendency towards removing colour, and its decision to mess about with scrolling. On colour, I absolutely agree with Griffiths: colour is regularly used by people to rapidly differentiate objects. Cognitive load is lowered, enabling you to get to something far more quickly and efficiently. This is a trend in Apple’s interface design I’d like to see reversed, and perhaps it will be if the no-longer monochrome prefs icons in iTunes 11 are anything to go by.

The other points in the piece centre on scrolling. First up, hidden scrollbars:

Of these changes the invisible scroll is the worst: an invisible scroll bar is a useless scroll bar. Without a visible scroll bar, a user is required to take action to reveal the fact that a dialog or window contains additional information.

This is something that used to annoy me about iOS, and I thought it would drive me nuts on OS X. In reality, it’s bothered me little. Perhaps it’s because I’ve often attached the idea of scrolling to pages, and pages are rarely relevant any more. Perhaps it’s because in the majority of cases, it’s obvious if there’s more content outside of your view (due to the way in which it’s cropped). Maybe OS X’s little ‘scroll preview’ that pops up on opening an item that’s bigger than the viewport is enough for me. Who knows?

Where I very much disagree with Griffiths is on the subject of scroll direction.

The backwards scrolling also drives me crazy; Apple calls this “natural” scrolling, while I call it “insanely stupid scrolling.” The change was made to match the way people scroll iOS devices. However, interaction on an iOS device is directly with the screen, and it makes logical sense that the content moves the direction your finger moves.

I don’t see the opposite as being any more logical on OS X. It’s certainly what people have been used to for a long time, but I’d say Apple’s ‘natural’ scrolling makes at least as much sense. The old system evolved from you manually dragging a scrollbar. This was further abstracted on laptops that made it possible to scroll a viewport without you having to bother with clicking on the actual scroll bar. Therefore, your cursor could be over some content, and you’d be two-finger scrolling, updating the position of the scrollbar, which updated what you saw in the viewport.

The current system is simpler: you’re manipulating content. This is how things always worked on iOS, but with multitouch trackpads being extremely commonplace on Macs (since laptops are by far the most common type of Mac sold, and trackpads are also a built-to-order option for laptops), it makes perfect sense to me. You push up and the content moves up. You pull down and the content moves down. This isn’t backwards at all—and you can still, if you want, grab the scrollbar and move content that way. (Additionally, you can go into System Preferences and click [x] I HATE CHANGE—possibly actually labelled ‘scroll direction’—if you like.) As a sanity check, I asked my parents about this, whose Macs were recently ‘forcibly’ upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion when I got sick of doing Snow Leopard support. “Oh, it makes much more sense,” said my dad, dismissing any notion in my mind that scroll direction was a big deal for the most part.