So long, Scott Forstall. Don’t let your crappy skeuomorphic designs hit your ass on the way out.
Skeuomorphism, or the tendency to deliberately make something new look like something old and familiar. Some people love it, some people hate it and think it’s tacky.
No matter how you feel, his love for skeuomorphism is one of many reasons that former iOS chief Scott Forstall was fired yesterday. Replacing him is Apple’s Senior VP of Design, Jonathan Ive, who will lead a new Human Interface Group in Apple… and whom reportedly loathes skeuomorphism with every fiber of his being.
All that fake leather stitching, those hideous textures, those bizarre font choices in iOS’s stock apps? If Ive gets his way – and we think he will — they’re all about to change.
Here are the eight skeuomorphic apps in iOS 6 we hope Jony Ive is going to change in iOS 7, along with some third-party apps we hope he takes inspiration from.
When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.
It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.
In OS X Mountain Lion, you can set a Calendar notification for a repeating event on your iPhone, then get that notification on your Mac. Conversely, you can set a Calendar event on your Mac and get it when you’re out and about with your iPhone. Pretty slick, right? It’s all a part of Apple’s new iCloud integration, and it works pretty well.
But what if you really don’t want to be notified of a certain type of event when you’re on your Mac? In OS X Mountain Lion, you now have a few more options for notifications that come from Calendar.
The interior of Steve Jobs’s private Gulfstream jet is what inspired the hideousness of iCal’s faux-leather skeuomorphism.
Hate skeuomorphism? Hate the way Apple’s slathering all of its apps with faux dead cow skin? Tough luck, because you know whose idea it was? Steve Jobs himself.
Remember that tip we gave you about showing more than seven days in a week in iCal? It’s been a while, but there used to be a way to enable a Debug menu in iCal to allow you to open multiple iCal windows, change the number of weeks that appear before and after the start date in Day View, and even show more than just seven days in a week.
Well, that debug menu has gone away in Mountain Lion, but we found a cool Terminal command that does something similar.
Many folks add events to their Calendar app on their iOS device the same way they’ve added events on paper since the way back days before smartphones and personal information managers. They flip to the date they want to add an event to, tap on the day, and then add it there.
This works, yes, but it can get tedious, with all the arrow tapping. What if your event is a couple years out? Even in month mode, tapping through 24 months is bound to get tedious.
Are you wondering why I said anachronistic? Well, seriously, the old-school world of fake leather and book bindings is goofy enough when it’s a real world item (unless it’s the sweet BookBook case for your iPhone…drool), but the skeumorphic leather and book bindings in newly-named Calendar and same-old-name Contacts apps in OS X Mountain Lion are ridiculous. I haven’t used a paper calendar or address book in years, even in the days before the iPhone. I know – gasp – there was life before iPhones.
Here’s an app that will remove this fugly visual choice – then you can forever thank us for helping you use your digital world just a bit more, erm, digitally.
Many of Mountain Lion’s new features are perfect for businesses, schools, and enterprises.
Mountain Lion includes over 200 new features. Some of them are dramatic and hard to miss while others are minor conveniences that don’t stand out immediately. Many of those big and small new features and improvements have a lot of appeal for business users.
Here’s a list of the many new features in Mountain Lion that can help professionals in almost any industry work smarter, more efficiently, and more effectively.
Fantastical is one of our favorite Mac apps here at Cult of Mac, because it makes managing your calendar a breeze — unlike Apple’s built-in Calendar application. Today it got a massive update that introduces support for OS X Mountain Lion (coming today!), Retina graphics for the new MacBook Pro, and more. It also has 50% off its price tag for a limited time.
Fantastical is one of my favorite Mac apps. The handy calendar app sits in my menubar and manages my schedule like a personal secretary. The beauty of Fantastical is that, unlike iCal on the Mac, you can quickly add complex events to your calendar using natural, everyday language. “Lunch with John at 12 on Thursday” translates to an event titled “Lunch with John” that’s automatically scheduled for Thursday at noon.
Flexibits, maker of Fantastical, announced a nice update to the app today. Version 1.3 adds Reminders integration, allowing you to add and edit reminders on your Mac and have them synced via iCloud to your iOS devices.
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