"Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what’s coming next except that you’re burning the road to outrun it"

I've just arrived back after a wonderful couple of weeks in and around San Francisco, and despite that vague sense that I don't know what day or time it is, I'm buzzing. We kept busy. There's lots I want to remember. Here's a list. Everyone likes lists.

• Clowns everywhere: clown dogs, glass clowns, terrifying mexican clowns, beat clowns and an in-the-street encounter my iPhone managed to lose;
• We stayed the first few nights in Henry Street, by the Castro. Nice area; very Brighton vibe;
• 826 Valencia scored two visits: 20 minutes wandering around, poking stuff, giggling;
• Gorgeous street art was everywhere. I'll not want for desktop wallpaper for some months;
• Popped into SFBeta on the second night. Liked what I saw of SendGrid (simple; boring but necessary; well-presented by staff who knew what they were talking about). Kinda disappointed by a couple of the other startups: folks there just didn't know basic facts about the businesses they were representing. The venue was great, there's bags of enthusiasm in the air and it felt well-organised, but also like the edges of a "scene", rather than a set of people uniformly out to change the world;
• The Creme Brûlée Cart. I can't add anything to that - amazing;
• The California Academy of Sciences: lovely museum, I particularly enjoyed the temperate environment they'd set up. Walking through humid air surrounding by large, colourful butterflies was a magical moment;
• We walked across Golden Gate Park, down to Ocean Beach and hung out with Pete and friends. I'd not seen Pete for years, and his friends (also employers) were lovely. Felt slight envy over an office from which one can see passing whales tho;
• Lots of wandering around different areas of the city, sampling the atmosphere and gasping at some of the properties;
• The Beat Museum, a scratched draft of Howl, and musty newspaper clippings;
• The seals at Pier 39 performed for us on several occasions. Down in Monterey, their cousins welcomed us back from a boat trip;
• We walked out along the coast, past the Golden Gate Bridge and to the Sutro baths;
• The Palace of Fine Arts had a couple of visits, one in cloud, one in sun. It was one of the high points for me: an elaborately constructed faux-roman ruin, build to crumble and reinstated after popular demand;
• The Japanese Garden and Arboretum in Golden Gate Park took us for another afternoon;
• The street performer who we wandered upon just south of the Park, balancing on a basketball, soulfully singing and whistling along to her accordion: we were spellbound;
• The Wave Organ at the end of the pier; it wasn't so tuneful when we were there, but a thing of beauty nonetheless;
• We suited up with SF Giants gear and went to our first baseball game, scratching at school-day memories of playing Rounders in an attempt to understand wtf was going on. I loved it, and I can't really tell why;
• I ate a Bear Claw. OK, it's a pastry;
• MOMA had an exhibition about Buckminster Fuller. I knew nothing about him. Now I know next-to-nothing, and have a few more books on the wish list. I think he had Burroughs write his telegrams;
• We found the concrete slide off Seward Street, procured wax paper, and propelled ourselves down it, swearing as quietly as possible;
• A tour around USS Pampanito: 5 minutes under the waterline was enough to persuade me that I am claustrophobic, after all, and would make a crap submariner. A gentleman on board told us an horrific story of an accidental sinking of 2000 Allied POWs. I remembered the Glowworm;
• It turned out we were staying 5 minutes from the Long Now Foundation. Who'da thought it?
• Dinner with Robert and some of his chums one night, and a private audience with the snaffler the following evening, both in lushest SOMA. Coincidentally, discovered a whisky I like;
• We drove out of town and south along the coast - past the most beautiful coastal scenery I've ever seen. Beaches, caves, waterfalls, railways;
• We popped into Carmel, and loathed it instantly;
• Two nights in Deetjens Inn at Big Sur: wandering down to beaches and into the woods by day, stuffing ourselves by night;
• We learned that nothing says "Hope" like a wooden chicken pushing a wheelbarrow full of apples, labelled "Hope";
• We also learned how to avoid, or attract, a mountain lion (which one you get depends heavily on whether your desire to see a mountain lion outweighs your desire to lose a small child);
• Popped into Esalen for a couple of hours in a hot tub and a massage. Could have become a hippy and stayed;
• I loved the beautiful pavement poetry in San Francisco (even if I didn't like the poems themselves, it was a bit more committed than "Poems on the Underground"), and we found poetry of a Vogon standard around Big Sur;
• Went whale-watching off Monterey. Saw some whales from a distance: interesting, but not really close enough to be all that meaningful;
• And then there was the food. We ate out, prodigiously, and never once had a dud meal.

So, err, pretty darn great then. "San Francisco is just like Brighton", they say. Well, They are wrong: it's a boatload nicer and more diverse, and the comparison is one I've only heard this side of the pond. I've stuck all my photos here so you can see for yourself.

There's a meme that's floated around for a few years now without being challenged, and it's that the success of Apple is explained by their focus on design, in particular through the work of a couple of in-house geniuses. The idea that their success is explained by the individual genius of Ive and Jobs is a convenient myth for them to encourage, but I don't think it's the whole story. And they don't think so either: witness the efforts to systematise their success by setting up an internal university, or Tim Cook's assertion that they don't share details of their process because it's part of their competitive advantage

Rather, what makes them scary, and probably fun, to compete with is that they do very well at very many things. Design is a part of this, but their software quality is good relative to their peers: witness the flood of developers moving from Windows to BSD-based MacOS in the early 2000s. They have done incredible things logistically (there's a good tale in the Jobs biography about their buying up capacity on air freight to get iPods delivered, I think). Their marketing is clear and consistent. And so on.

I don't mean to eulogise them here. Not everything they touch turns to gold (just look at Ping, or iAd) and I find the regulations and control around the App Store a little hard to stomach; they feel like they lead to a slightly cloying Disney-like experience sometimes. But the idea that to succeed like Apple, you just need to "get design" and have a few solitary geniuses? It's inaccurate and naive.

I'll start by saying it: I don't understand what the fuss is about skeuomorphic interfaces. Or rather - I understand the fuss, but think it's misplaced. And there /is/ lots of fuss - it seems to be second only to Comic Sans in its notoriety in design circles just now. Witness Adam Greenfield ("somebody in Apple’s UX shop has saddled them with the most awful and mawkish and flat-out tacky visual cues"), or Clive Thompson in Wired ("skeuomorphs are hobbling innovation by lashing designers to metaphors of the past").

I've been collecting scattered thoughts and conversations about it for some time now. Hearing Jack Schulze defend it during a talk he co-presented with Timo Arnall at St. Bride's has spurred me into drawing this material together into a post.

Skeuomorphism is nothing new, as I learned during a chance conversation with Jo Rabin and Alex Craxton during post-MoMo pizza last year. Jo referenced the Doric columns of ancient Greece, which sported fluted shafts inherited from earlier wooden columns. In the originals, the flutes improved the strength of the structure and allowed for draining; once wood was abandoned these concerns were moot, but the form remained. Alex talked about Jugendstil, which used symbolic features on buildings that referred back to classical as well as natural form. And Alex G popped her head above the parapet just recently to comment that skeuomorphs remind her of paintings like those of the Flemish primitives, or even illusionism:

"either the artistic tradition in which artists create a work of art that appears to share the physical space with the viewer or more broadly the attempt to represent physical appearances precisely – also called mimesis"

Skeuomorphism is often rejected on the grounds of taste ("it looks tacky") or generates despondence from its shackling of digital interfaces to old metaphors. The latter offends for two reasons: the resulting interfaces are limited by their chains, and the approach is inherently backwards-looking. I can imagine similar views being expressed in architecture and art quite easily.

(In an attempt to depress still further, Jo also pointed out that we're seeing double-skeumorphs in some places: "the form of the iCal interface mimics a leatherette desk set - itself a skeuomorph of a proper leather bound one")

I think Adam's points are good ones, actually: as time goes on, it's clear that the digital metaphors we use for physical content become increasingly inappropriate. You can see the music and publishing industries struggling with this right now, as they try to sell easily-duplicated digital songs and books as though they were hard-to-copy physical items. The street finds its own uses for these metaphorical gaps.

But even so I'm not convinced that skeumorphism is a bad thing. Watch Apple, the doyen of the design industry, take this approach in so many places that it can't be considered experimental or accidental: Newsstand, Find My Friends, Calendar, Address Book, probably others. Apple aren't perfect (cough Ping cough), but when they make such a deliberate and contentious choice across many products, I believe it's worth lending the approach some credence and trying to work out what they're up to.

At the BERG talk, Jack laid out a spirited defence which I completely buy: skeuomorphism is a justifiable and inevitable approach to take when the interactions in your interface are direct-manipulative and use physical metaphors. If they behave as though they are real things, should they not appear like real things? To paraphrase his point: if it's walking like a duck, it should quack.

I also find this line of reasoning supportive of my emotional response to skeuomorphs: on the desktop I find the hardback feel of the address book tacky; on a touch-screen device I find an almost-identical interface absolutely fine:

As Apple push computing beyond the creative industries who provided their early adopters and into the sweaty palms of the mass market, I think The S Word will become more appropriate. Pascal Raabe defends the approach in a recent article on the UsTwo blog, noting that "texture and physicality give clues as to how an interface works" (just look at the bevelling or brushed metal of modern UIs), as well as the pitfalls which arise when the expectations thus created are broken. It's easy to watch novice computing users and observe that they seem much more inclined to experiment, and make sensible first choices, when using iOS devices than when using desktop Macs or PCs. And as Marek pointed out in a chat after the BERG talk, end-users don't seem to find skeuomorphism as contentious as some of us working on software and interfaces.

Oh, and one thing I hope that critics and supporters of skeuomorphism can agree whole-heartedly on: as Matt pointed out, you don't half feel clever trotting that word out.

Update: Alex has posted some of her thoughts, explaining the illusionism side of things better than I have.

Via this New Scientist story ("Free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads"), I came to the site of Abhinav Pathak, a PhDer at Purdue. He's been working on energy usage in mobile devices (a topic dear to my heart) building tools to measure the energy usage characteristics of Windows Mobile and Android devices, and thereby model the energy performance of apps. Very interesting stuff; I'd been looking for something similar last year without success.

His 2011 paper presents the modelling side of things. He has two more recent papers listed on his site which don't seem available just yet, and Google Scholar fails to turn them up too. Looks like we'll have to wait until they're presented?

Back in December of last year, I did an HCI project around designing an alarm clock. I wrote about it a little bit here, and - in an attempt to duplicate a design-crit process I've seen elsewhere - solicited some really helpful feedback from some of the readers of this blog.

For one reason or another the project took a little while to get marked, but we had it handed back this week. It's unlikely to be of interest to anyone, but given that quite a few of you helped, I've put the report (all 50mb of it!) here. It's been given a provisional mark of 83%: not shabby, but not amazing either.

Overall, I felt a bit "meh" about what I'd produced, for a few reasons:

1. It didn't really conclude with what I felt was much of a design. I'd tested a few ideas but with 3 test subjects, didn't feel I drew many conclusions;

2. As noted in the report itself, I didn't get much value from doing a mid-fi prototype (which was mandated as part of the project). I think I would've done better to explore more ideas as lo-fi sketches, and move to hi-fidelity when getting them onto a real device. I felt that some issues test participants observed could be explained by the deceptive fidelity of the prototype;

3. I referenced, but didn't feel I ever tested, "stroking not poking" (Warning: "bad workman" ahead). Throughout the project I struggled to find tools which would let me prototype the fine-grained touch interactions (e.g. drag a hand around a clock) on a real mobile device. At the time I presumed that they exist somewhere but are proprietary. Since then I've heard rumour that even within Apple, iOS app prototyping is done with Keynote. I evaluated Keynote and found it wanting - so I missed a trick there, I think;

4. I think I'd made my life harder for myself by doing some research up-front in the form of a survey (reasoning that I know nothing about sleep habits, and ought to). There was a 2500 word limit for the project, and reporting the survey ate into this. One very reasonable criticism from the marker's feedback was that I could've gone into more detail on the literature; I'd originally written much more, but cut it down for the final version. A lesson learned: this project was supposed to be either research or design; I shouldn't have tried to do both.
   

Some good stuff did come out, though: I was surprised to observe that analogue clock-faces are easier to read from a distance, compared to digital displays. The survey validated my original suspicion that the high-cost-of-failure associated with oversleeping, combined with the high frequency of oversleeping, indicates there's a worthwhile problem to be solved here. And in future I would use the combination of "Omnigraffle exporting to HTML" and LiveView to quickly test UIs which needed fewer unusual touch interactions.

Thanks to everyone who lent a hand - the 186 people who filled out my survey, and everyone who commented on the blog or sent me emails. In particular Nick Richards and Dave Whiteland were awesomely helpful :)