Stupid
Stupid thing to fire Apple's most talented engineering manager and then trash skeumophism. Especially, since Apple's greatest manager ever over the history of time, Steve Jobs, is said to have supported it.
I'm dubious about the alternatives to skeumorphism that engineers are trying to build up. I'm sure there is no shortage of engineers who love this sort of abstract software stuff, but regular people don't. That is what Steve Jobs brought to Apple that managers at other companies never had - a motivation to design products (especially software) that connect with ordinary people - not necessarily engineers. Engineers are often the last to adopt humanistic design principles in software (witness the number of geeks and engineers who still insist on changing the skin over Windows XP or later so that it still looks like Windows 98 or NT. They think this save a couple clock cycles on their gpu or something. OK. Does anyone in the real world actually care?).
Designing software is not the same as designing hardware. Nobody really needs to see the hardware, so that's why simple lines and clean interfaces are optimal.
Alternatively, the software needs to communicate intuitively to the user the use of the particular "mode" that the device is in, and skeumorphism is a very efficient, recognizable and intuitive way to connect with users on that. It's comforting. They like it.
I would liken it to the difference between the canvas and frame of a painting, to the painting itself. The device is like the frame of the painting. It should be simple and unintrusive. However, the paint on the canvas is the software. Not all aspects of it are orderly or it would be boring and uninteresting. It has a historical and social understanding and meaning that is not necessarily based only on the engineering principles of paint or its use. It draws on people's experience in life and culture, and so the social context is extremely important. People make an emotional connection to the painting, as opposed to the frame, which they don't. If there is a humanistic component to a painting (and the most celebrated paintings have that), it is in the application of the paint and not in the frame.
I think Steve Jobs understood this well, and communicated it best when he talked about his love of classical artistry in typefaces as one of his inspirations for the Mac. It would have been easier and simpler to stick to a single font like Courier font like say MS DOS, but that's not what life is about and that's not how 95% of people connect (even if engineers and designers wish that they would).
I worry that the new software interface will lose the connection that ordinary people have to their iOS devices.
An analogy might be like an old Braun TV set with wonderful device styling, but which comes preloaded with programming that consists only of inaccessible European art house films with intentionally difficult to follow or boring plots. You know, those films that are shot in modern homes with straight lines, and where they try to pare the script down to as few words as possible so that 40% of the movie is totally silent.
For software interface design, Apple needs an artist who is more like a painter or a graphic design artist, than someone who is like an architect or engineer. Someone who sees art in what an ordinary engineer may see as only extraneous. Someone who taps into his intuition and not just his logical brain. I don't know Forstall personally, but it seems like he may have been that sort of person.
Worrisome. But we'll have to see what comes out.
MS Metro is so wonderfully abstract and looks modern and slick, but guess what; hardly anyone likes to use it. After you get over the initial novelty it appears quite boring and your eye doesn't really catch on any one tile in any unique way over any other.
Hey, If Jony wants to get rid of skeumorphism and its analogous design principles altogether, why not get rid of the software buttons, software toggle switches, and hey, just put a command line and we can all run UNIX commands from Siri voice recognition. That would be awesome from the engineering standpoint. However 99% of the population doesn't connect with that, even if there are some engineers who could. That's why this could be a bad idea.
