[sambeau]

I don't get it.

He spends most of the article telling us that skeuomorphs are bad giving the example of calendar app that looks like a desk calendar and then finishes by praising an app with a screen that skeuomorphically flips up just like a wall-calendar.

[dagw]

The difference (at least as I understood it) is that that app isn't a wall calendar and chose that approach because they believed it was the best design, not because they wanted to mimic a wall calendar. Most designers of calendar and calculator software set out to design something as close to a paper calendar or desktop calculator as possible without necessarily asking if it was the best possible design.

Or in summary Mimicking because it is good design that fits what you're trying to do is good, mimicking simply for the sake mimicking is bad.

[itmag]

Yeah, there's a lot of cached thoughts in UI design.

Someone should start an open source lab that sets out to explore and test new design patterns in that space, without any preconceived notions of what should and should not work.

[sambeau]

Mimicking another object's behaviour on a known object loses the advantage that a skeuomorph gives you, namely muscle memory. Skeuomorphs are used for very good reasons: they are immediately familiar so a user doesn't have to think before using them. For every person who finds them too cute and annoying there are an order more who find them helpful (and in a world of scary technology) comforting.