Apple's aesthetic dichotomy
I hate how the Calendar app, Find My Friends, Game Center, etc, has leather stitching, torn pages, felt fabric backgrounds, and whatnot. It aggravates me to no end. It’s so condescending, as if we’re so stupid that we could never wrap our heads around such applications on a digital device.
When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone - perhaps his greatest product presentation - he joked that the iPhone was an iPod with a rotary dialing system on the front. It was deliberately absurd, and the audience duely delivered the anticipated laugh. (I’m reliably informed that an early prototype of the phone actually did feature such an interface.)
But no one laughs when Apple delivers a calendar application for the iPad that tries its hardest to look like a real-word desktop calendar pad, complete with fake leather and “torn” pages.
Still fewer have a chuckle when they see the new Address Book app on Mac OS X Lion, or the even more recent Find My Friends iPhone app.
