Skeuomorph

Skeuomorphs are cultural algorithms, borrowing functional forms of the past to make the new objects of similar function more comfortably familiar. The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.

Apple's felt or leather served no functional purpose. They are faux realism, not skeuomorphism. Similarly, a digitally simulated voltmeter is not skeuomorphic, it is not a new object made familiar by borrowing a past form. It's just a digital replica.

Meanwhile, buttons with drop shadows, buttons that appear to depress complete with haptic feedback, are skeuomorphic. Apple Notes being yellow lined note paper could be called skeumorphic. And certainly, the rolodex tabs for letter groups in Contacts were clearly skeuomorphic.

This is an interesting video, and it initially defines the term correctly, but then incorrectly buckets many things as skeuomorphic to make a point, when in fact the objected to them tended to be they were not skeuomorphic at all.

Borrowing functional forms of the past to make new affordances comfortable and familiar, given them the right feel in your use, remains a good idea, at least for a transitional time.

Form indicates function? Or at least insinuates.

I think that definition misses most of the point that the similarity is a deliberate throwback. I'd say a skeuomorph is a (often otherwise unnecessary) design feature that makes a new object feel familiar.

"Skeuomorphs are material metaphors. They are informational attributes of artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory. They help us map the new onto an existing cognitive structure..." — Nicholas Gessler

> You seem to be saying the he's very talented, so it's likely not a lack of ability, but a lack of will.

False dichotomy ... If a developer does quality work as claimed above, its unlikely he's missing deadlines from lack of will, wasting time, or laziness.

Thankfully the post continues by offering more likely reasons:

> there are blocks in his way preventing him from executing ... feature creep, unexpected maintenance, infrastructure problems, people problems... figure out how to help fix those problems, rather than just hand-waving as "missing deadlines".

> he is consistently missing deadlines and has failed to be very productive. His work is of top quality (why I selected him), but his progress is disappointingly slow

Programmers "misunderestimate" deadlines. There are countless books written about this, and very little to do about it other than recognize it as an inconvenience.

The largest factor is usually "scope creep", where business interests inject additional details as the project progresses, each of which adds time but rarely get adjusted into the estimate. All these time deficits accumulate and interact to snowball delays far beyond expectations of both technical and marketing teams.

Either stoically push deadlines back for every change, or ruthlessly postpone these requests till future releases.

Also keep in mind that if your startup is doing something new, you're often asking for deadlines on "inventing the lightbulb". It will work when it works.

Startup development is usually not "engineering". Building a bridge is a known and quantifiable effort. Inventing a new business engine is often not.

Handstand.

(Or fingers.)

Tanks are still driven this way. Never thought of it as reins.

I suppose now the cat's out of the bag.

> clearly unarmed

Even "collateralmurder.com" says the men are carrying "something that might be a weapon" and "what appears to be a weapon" and that site is hardly unbiased.

Meaning revenue if this particular latest good month were multiplied by 12, which, if growing, gives a number larger than actual annual revenue.

I understand the pigeonhole filing example, but I quit "filing" years ago. It's tedious. Tagging also takes too much thought, particularly at recall time: did I tag that "development" or "programming"? I just use search.

I have a script that monitors my desktop. Any file not modified within the past 8 hours is moved to a folder dated for the end of this week. That gives me 52 folders a year, granular enough to find a file manually if I know roughly when I dealt with it.

My desktop stays clean except for what I'm actively working on, and I don't look for files hierarchically or by category/tag. To find something, I use Spotlight search. That's faster than navigating a folder hierarchy would be even if I knew exactly where the file was.

That's also why I love Gabor's reMail on the iPhone.