A Happy Anniversary Day

Today is our 38th wedding anniversary. These flowers were waiting for me when I came back from working in the library for about an hour. For dinner we dined at Redwood Firewood Grill on the shore of Center Lake. Interesting food with Latin American touches. We will have to go for lunch someday when it is not humid and steamy like tonight so we can sit on the deck.

 Monday I helped one of my backyard neighbors with some minor computer nuisances. She has Windows 8 which I have never used so it took a bit of trial and error to fix things. AVG had usurped her regular home page; probably happened during an update where she didn’t uncheck a box. Crazy how browsers and utilities try to sneak in their own products. Working with Windows 8 helped me to feel more confident about updating to Windows 10. I think I may reserve the update but not install until I have read reviews. I do need to check my memory capacity first though.

 Another neighbor has decided to finally join the digital camera age. She wants recommendations for a point and shoot camera. However, she wants it to work well in low light. Any advice? What cameras have you used that you liked or disliked? My own camera is over 12 years old. I had been looking at Sony Cybershot DSC-RX100 as an upgrade partly because my Olympus doesn’t do well in low light. However, this camera costs more than my neighbor wants to pay, and though it can do auto mode, it has manual settings if one wants to experiment with those. You may have noticed that many of my close-up photos are blurry. At first, I thought the camera wasn’t working right, but alas, it is me. I have developed a slight tremor in my left hand. My doctor thinks it is familial tremor. My grandfather had a bobbing head in his later years, and an aunt had a flapping jaw. So I am not sure I should invest in a camera if I have trouble steadying it. The tremor is likely to become more pronounced as I age and even develop in the other hand or other body parts. Bear with me and my blurry photos; I still like to take photographs too much to stop.

Skeuomorphism

The June 3rd, 2013 Time has an article about skeuomorphism, a word and concept totally new to me but apparently highly debated in user interface circles. The word was actually coined in 1890. In the example given from that article, it defines the term as vestiges of functional design that remained as decorative elements as items evolved. Stone axes that were wrapped with a leather thong to hold the head and handle together needed the thong. Later axes were held together differently, but manufacturers etched a criss-cross thong design on the handle.

 

The current discussion has more to do with GUI (graphic user interface) that retains representations that are not functionally needed. The trashcan icon for deleting items on a computer, for example. Personally, I think the carry-over of these everyday pictorial symbols makes it easier to learn and use an interface. I haven’t seen an ipad, but I guess its “bookshelves” look like wood-grained shelving. People are saying that Windows 8 has gotten away from skeuomorphs. Maybe. My sister-in-law hates Windows 8 because she doesn’t know where to look for stuff. Her visual cues are no longer there. She was a high school librarian who taught students and staff how to efficiently use computer software. Now she feels like she is fumbling along on her new computer, in part because the interface is so different.

 

Antiskeuomorphists would say that carrying over these visual representations rather than using excitingly different representations keeps us from realizing the potential of using technology in better ways. I think it is human nature to feel comfortable with interfaces where we can intuit uses. One of the people quoted in the Time article says skeuomorphs are lies; we need to move beyond them. What do you think?