Yup... on top of that, this is the same person that he fired for disagreeing with him on the design aspects of these apps. Forstall was convinced that people weren't going to embrace apps unless they had an analog parallel that people could see as a bridge between what the technology could do and what already existed in real life. Jobs (Edit: maybe not, but a higher-up at Apple), on the other hand, wanted people to figure out on their own what the technology was capable of and skip all the cartoonish skeumorphism. I think you can objectively say, in hindsight, that Jobs was right even there.
PS. Yes, I know that Forstall left Apple after Jobs' death but Jobs and Ive pretty much saw eye to eye on the design of Apple products. (Edit: Removed "Steve famously hated skeumorphism.")
This is completely incorrect. I was at Apple working on iOS during this time period and helped implement and optimize many of those skeuomorphic UIs. Steve was a huge proponent of skeuomorphism.
One example is the iPad Contacts app. Originally it was a simple list of contacts like you'd find in Outlook. This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.
> This was changed to the "little address book" UI that looked like a leather-bound address book much later in the process because the original UI wasn't "fun" enough.
Apparently the iCal stitching was copied from leather seats on Jobs' private jet! You couldn't make this stuff up[1].
If that's the case, then I'm mistakenly attributing that decision to Steve but it was definitely a major part of the reason that Forstall was removed from Apple. I worked at Apple too when Steve was still there and I remember there being a shift right around the time of the iPad release to move away from skeumorphism as "people don't need to be convinced" to use tools by making them feel like real life. There were still layovers like the contacts app but new apps that were being created were all ditching the real-life look.
We're all just trading second-hand gossip here, I suspect, but according the official account [1] Forstall was laid off because he didn't play well with the top management. He was maneuvering politically within the hierarchy in a way that Cook did not condone, and he could no longer be protected by Jobs. The Apple Maps fiasco probably had a lot to do with it, too.
(Unfortunately, I think they fired the guy who, among all of them, was the most like Jobs, and I think Apple has suffered as a result.)
To say that he was fired for skeumorphism is insane. Jobs was responsible for that stuff.
Amen... It must have been Jony that hated the skeumorphism. I just remember a very heated debate and, frankly, my memory tends to conflate different events together when they're similar. Steve sided with Jony in a lot of design arguments so when then big change away from skeumorphism came, I seemed to remember Steve agreeing that, while it was great for initial adoption of the platform, computers were mainstream enough to not need that analog appeal. I'm probably wrong, but seeing the rapid shift away from it at Apple makes me feel like it wasn't an isolated incident/debate.
> Mark Bramhill: It meant nothing. Chrysler even admitted that the majority of it came from just outside Newark, New Jersey — not Corinth. The term was a marketing lie, meant to evoke feelings of old. Somehow, this seems fitting for Find My Friends. The leather made something so conceptually futuristic a little more familiar, even if it was nonsensical. It was a reassuring callback to an old aesthetic. And of course, where would the CEO of Apple find a reassuring, comforting texture?
Dave Wiskus: According to legend, it was the exact leather and stitching on his private jet.
PS. Yes, I know that Forstall left Apple after Jobs' death but Jobs and Ive pretty much saw eye to eye on the design of Apple products. (Edit: Removed "Steve famously hated skeumorphism.")