[manyxcxi]

I disagree. Radial gauges immediately convey accepted boundaries and where your real time measurement is within those.

For example, I've done a fair bit of racing in my day- we take the tach and any other various gauges and rotate them so that when the needle is pointing straight up, it's where you expect the reading to be.

Say you have a CPU monitor where under a certain threshold reduces nodes in the cluster and over adds. This can vary from application to application and you're monitoring 5. Sure is nice to get the high, low, and current in one glance.

Now, there certainly could be equal as or better ways of displaying it. You could do away with a skeumorphic face for sure. But a radial gauge itself I would argue is very useful.

[throwawayIndian]

+1. Totally agree!

I hate this bullshit propaganda that goes like "this is skeuomorphic and the other thing is not". There is nothing in the world of software that isn't a skeuomorphic equivalent of some thing or some process that has already existed in this world.

Look at Object Oriented Programming, for example. Look at 'Code is poetry' for a comparison. Look at button design. Look at page design {Header, Footer, Body} of a webpage. Look at flat design for that matter! Look at iWatch interface with hands of a clock/watch. Look at the dialpad on your mobile phone.

Tell me which one isn't skeuomorphic? Zilch! Yawns… at these skeuomorphism police.

[throwawayReply]

I didn't say all skeuomorphism is bad, I said that gauges are an example of bad skeuomorphism. Buttons are an example of good skeuomorphism.

[throwawayIndian]

So you don't like the "default skin" of the application. That should be pretty easy to replace with something that suits your taste.

Consideration of "good" vs. "bad" of anything is essentially a trait of use vs. them propaganda. Better to skip it.

Yes, buttons are good form of actionable design!

[coldtea]

>Consideration of "good" vs. "bad" of anything is essentially a trait of use vs. them propaganda.

Value judgements are both very, well, valuable AND not "propaganda".

Some things ARE plainly worse than others for some uses or in general too.

Nothing "propagandish" about aknowledging that. Even if you are wrong in your evaluation it's simply a mistake, not propaganda.

Propaganda is a method you employ to convey things (not necessarily judgements even, could be calls to action, warnings, etc) in order to brainwash people to accept them.

As such, it is orthogonal to judging things as good vs bad.

Thus, I deem this argument "bad". And not in a Michael Jackson way.

[throwawayIndian]

I agree with you mostly.

Not with the anti-skeuomorphism tirade however. That is pure propaganda.

Anti-skeuomorphism picked up momentum only after Apple's iOS7 update -- around the time when Tim Cook took over and Apple (and its fanboys) moved away from purpose-inspired design to selling 'flat and clean' (supposedly purpose-oriented) design.

Whether it was good or bad move for them eventually is another subject altogether.

[coldtea]

>Not with the anti-skeuomorphism tirade however. That is pure propaganda.

Maybe let's put it this way: a lot of it is misguided and/or throwing the baby with the bathwater.

But it does have some merit in some cases: when the skeuomorphic design dictates the use according to non-existing in the digital world constrains.

For example the dreadful DVD player apps of yore, that mimicked physical DVD players, making us push the same inconvenient buttons we hated on the physical devices too, but without any reason like the physical objects had.