Skeuomorphic

Today's word of the day comes from Adam Greenfield in an excellent post on Apple's interface design choices. Specifically, Greenfield decries Apple for their cheesy faux-analog Calendar, Notes and the cringe-worthy page turn within iBooks. As you might now imagine, a skeuomorph is "a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." Seems like a word that might come in handy. Greenfield's solution:

What Apple has to do now is find the visual language that explains the difference between a networked text and a book, a networked calendar entry and a page leaf, or a networked locational fix and a compass heading, and does so for a mass audience of tens or hundreds of millions of non-science-fiction-reading, non-interface-geek human users. The current direction is inexplicable, even cowardly, and the task sketched here is by no means easy. But if anybody can do this, it's the organization that made generations of otherwise arcane propositions comprehensible to ordinary people, that got out far enough ahead of the technology that their offerings Just Worked.

[Via Daring Fireball]