Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bornon5 5238 days ago
If his argument is valid, there's no logical reason to stop where he does. You see a continuous progression of weeks instead of discrete months; fine. But what about days? What's so special about the end of one day and the beginning of the next? Nothing - it's just an artifact of paper calendars, daily planners, and so on.

What a calendar should be, if we're going to truly abolish the tragedy of skeuomorphism, is a smoothly flowing timeline, with you at the front, diminishing logarithmically into the future. This way, you can clearly see your appointments. Should make the author happy.

The point is, sometimes we need to artificially break things up into manageable pieces. We think in milestones - the beginning of a season, midnight as a landmark showing how late you're staying up. Some skeuomorphic designs are only "incidentally" skeuomorphic, in that they solve a problem the right way, and just happen to resemble how people used to solve that problem.