When I discovered the controversy around skeuomorphism a few months ago, I kept reading over and over again that what made its movement grow easier is the fact that iOS apps are all "full screen". It's not a crazy argument: If your app is full screen, then a completely different design is tend to be much more accepted by the end user.
Still, this is a weird argument, especially if you ever used the Macintosh before System 7. Up to System 6, the Macintosh lacked the ability to display more than one application at a time on screen. Actually, until the "Multi Finder" in System 5 (or 6?), only one application would run at a time, period. Yep, eerily similar to the evolution of iOS. So were Macintosh applications drastically different from each other? Apart from games, not at all. Actually, they were even more consistent than Mac OS X applications made by Apple today.
So, why were applications more consistent back then? Because developers were more careful about it? No. It's simpler than that: Customizing a GUI back then was too difficult to do, so developers ought to reuse the built-in GUI components. It's purely a cost-benefit analysis: Make the common widgets dead easy to use, and developers will use them. But if customization is easy, the for sure many apps will do so just to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.
So, my stance is that you just can't prevent developers to push out GUI innovation by competing each other. But I still think that, in the end, doing too much of it not only might create GUIs that are unusable, but also divests money away from the plain functional aspect of the app. So much so that apps that look "too" good tend to indicate wasted Silicon Valley startup budget, and maybe hide shady corporate practices of a small company that only hopes to sell user data through acquisition. Maybe I'm getting too jaded of those shiny social iPhone apps...
Published on November 12, 2012 at 21:05 EST
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