This article on Apple and skeuomorphic design explains that it’s time to move on, and I agree. We long moved away from the need to have our software represent real hardware. There’s many reasons for that. The article suggests that one reason that real-world metaphors were once helpful in teaching people how to use software, but I think it’s more than just that. Making things look like real things made interfaces look better when things were lower resolution. It’s hard to develop forms that could lead to good decisions when they still looked a lot like pixels.

But no we’ve reached a point know where UI that is purely digital is also intuitive. In fact interfaces can be more intuitive than reality now, because they don’t need us follow real-world constraints in order to reach the results we want.

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