Even today I feel like the new flat UIs are a bit too flat, like how some input fields (like in the Phone app on iOS) are completely invisible so you don't know that they're there.

Exactly. GUIs are supposed to look like things: buttons and displays, because the state of those things is immediately understood. Simple beveling and shadowing on a rectangle can tell you if the button is on or off. No one is calling for it to have a "brushed-metal" finish or dust motes on it.

Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.

Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?

iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.

Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.

This. "Skeuomorphism UI is so bad, OMG" was just a journalistic fad/bandwagon when there was too many years of it and people who just get their opinions from op-eds. It will make its cycle back to fashion in the future.

In the first years, Aqua UI was praised as "lickable" and extremely pretty, and iOS skeuomorphic UIs wowed the world (and and where copied far and wide by competitors) for 5-6 years before any complaints.

Aqua was insanely good. Everyone else rushed to replicate it. Windows Vista/7 were “Redmond does Aqua”. The Linux DEs had craploads of Aqua-like skins. Given a choice, I’d love to get Aqua back. The “material” school of design is brutalist, sterile, and unloving, whereas Aqua was human, sexy, and comforting.

This. People forget how new touch was to a generation coming from the mouse, windows and scroll wheels.

You're forgetting the fake leather on the calendar, and the ugly green felt of the Game Center. https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...

Yes, it became outdated after several years in use (6 on the iPhone?) and perhaps even didn't age well looking back on it. But for the time it was used it was definitely not a failure. Design preferences change, it doesn't mean everything that is replaced is automatically deemed a failure.

And unlike many other design trends that are purely about aesthetics, skeuomorphism also had a practical aspect: people had to "learn" a whole new way of interaction with these devices and using familiar shapes and textures helped. The "Start" button in Windows is called like that because people literally needed to be told where to start with the "futuristic" GUI.

So?

Those examples are not the really bad aspects of skeuomorphic -- which is about not taking advantage of the unique digital opportunities for UI controls, and instead e.g. copying a DVD hardware interface or some other physical mechanism verbatim.

At worst, they're tacky. You can do equally tacky things in non skeuomorphic UIs.

But even that is just taste. All kinds of imitation materials are still used all around UIs and design, and still considered beautiful (e.g. frosted glass -- there's actually no glass. UI lights with diffusion, there's no real material to diffuse their light. Etc.).

Ipaq had touch 3-4 years before iPhone came out. Obviously not as slick. People seem to always forget that the iPhone was just an evolution not some kind of magically unexpected or unanticipated device.

As someone that was a daily iPAQ user with it Bluetooth tethered to my phone, they aren't even comparable.

The browser on the iPhone was actually good for the time. Touch actually worked, the display was responsive, they OSK was quite fast, and the lack of copy/paste was just dumb.

I ditched the iPAQ as soon as I held the iPhone and used it for five minutes.

I remember CRT touchscreens being used as cash registers in the late 90s. It's true, touch was nothing new. What was new was the combination of capacitive touch and a slick responsive UI. Previous systems had unresponsive GUIs or inferior touchscreen technology like resistive, IR or lightpen.

Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.

What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7

IMHO multi-touch is really overrated in significance. The only multi finger gesture I use is pinch zoom and it’s like once a week. If that was a widget or triple tapping or something, I wouldnt notice.

The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.

Super responsive typing actually does depend on multitouch, because if you type fast then you will have multiple fingers touching different keys at the same time.

It's a stretch to call that multi-touch. The key press events are still a serialised stream of single finger touches. When people have spoken about multi-touch features and patents they have invariably been referring to chords and gestures.

From the app standpoint it is, but not from the actual implementation algorithm.

I owned a fingerworks keyboard in 2003. The multi touch and gestures were amazing. And it was physically painful to type on. Try touch typing on a solid surface for any length of time. Fingertip bruises are no fun. The company mysteriously vanished shortly after announcing an after market multitouch keyboard for the iBook...

That's the company that was purchased by Apple, as described in the book I linked to above.

Touch interfaces were not widely used on much of anything prior to the mid 2000's. Yes there were exceptions, but it wasn't really used for general computing.

Seeing that I was programming ruggedized Windows CE based devices before the iPhone came out, I didn’t forget anything. But, the generally consumer market didn’t use Windows CE devices and Windows CE wasn’t exactly the definition of user friendly mobile design.

This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.