Re:The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio]
by sangnoir on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @06:05AM
(#13364031)
> This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.
Apparently the iCal stitching was copied from leather seats on Jobs' private jet! You couldn't make this stuff up[1].
1. http://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respon...
Re:The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio]
by dkonofalski on Monday January 09, 2017 @06:26PM
(#13360908)
If that's the case, then I'm mistakenly attributing that decision to Steve but it was definitely a major part of the reason that Forstall was removed from Apple. I worked at Apple too when Steve was still there and I remember there being a shift right around the time of the iPad release to move away from skeumorphism as "people don't need to be convinced" to use tools by making them feel like real life. There were still layovers like the contacts app but new apps that were being created were all ditching the real-life look.
Re:The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio]
by lobster_johnson on Monday January 09, 2017 @09:11PM
(#13361953)
We're all just trading second-hand gossip here, I suspect, but according the official account [1] Forstall was laid off because he didn't play well with the top management. He was maneuvering politically within the hierarchy in a way that Cook did not condone, and he could no longer be protected by Jobs. The Apple Maps fiasco probably had a lot to do with it, too.
(Unfortunately, I think they fired the guy who, among all of them, was the most like Jobs, and I think Apple has suffered as a result.)
To say that he was fired for skeumorphism is insane. Jobs was responsible for that stuff.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott-fo...
Re:The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio]
by dkonofalski on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @12:16PM
(#13366586)
Amen... It must have been Jony that hated the skeumorphism. I just remember a very heated debate and, frankly, my memory tends to conflate different events together when they're similar. Steve sided with Jony in a lot of design arguments so when then big change away from skeumorphism came, I seemed to remember Steve agreeing that, while it was great for initial adoption of the platform, computers were mainstream enough to not need that analog appeal. I'm probably wrong, but seeing the rapid shift away from it at Apple makes me feel like it wasn't an isolated incident/debate.
One example is the iPad Contacts app. Originally it was a simple list of contacts like you'd find in Outlook. This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.