richmond62 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2019 3:17 pm
It is possible to make a much more attractive Page Curl with Apple Keynotes, and the end result can
be exported as an animated GIF which can be broken down into its constituent frames with Quicktime.
However you end up with a lot of heavy files.
Very. With enough pages, prohibitively so.
It, also, does not allow you to set the 'back' of the curled page to a different images source
to the front image.
This may be among the reasons Microsoft, then Apple and now everyone, began the design evolution away from skeuomorphism a while back.
Visual affordances emulating real-world objects were useful in the early days of computing. Few people had spent time with computers, but most are familiar with a Rolodex, a printed book, a leather binder, a car dashboard, etc.
Metaphors always have trade-offs, for all the reasons Aristotle wrote about: ultimately there is a difference between any two things being compared, so that, powerful as they can be, all metaphors ultimately break down. But in those early days of computer interactions the upsides of familiarity outweighed the downsides of unmeetable expectations and constraints.
30 years later, we design for a very different audience. People our age have been using computers at least most of that time, and most younger people have never known a world without ubiquitous computing.
Now we face the subtler aspects of Aristotle's warning, and have an opportunity to up our game. Rather than continuing the old tradition of limiting computers to emulate physical objects, we live in a world where our contemporary audiences understand the fluidity of computers as a thing in itself, and expectations have been raised for flexibility beyond what we can do with objects in the physical world.
So-called "Flat Design", first introduced in Microsoft's Metro design language with other variants later adopted by Apple, Google, and the rest, is more than just visual fashion. It's the embodiment of a sober realization that we use computers not just to do old things faster, but often to do entirely new things. Flat design's visual simplicity isn't the goal, but merely a means of simplifying the interface so the user can focus on using the new functionality. While it looks different from the old world where buttons had drop shadows and other details emulating the physical world, it's not really about how it
looks as much as how it
works.
When we leave behind visual metaphors of the physical world, we also leave behind the constraints of those objects. Physical buttons on an appliance can't change their labels, but in software there can be good reason to do. A printed book can't reformat itself dynamically to create open space to match the size of an annotation a reader might want to write, but in software have total flexibility to do that fluidly.
So if we set aside the constraints of the physical world to celebrate this moment in UX evolution where we can finally embrace the inherent dynamism of computing, we can ask:
What is a page?
And from there we get the corollary question:
How does one navigate from one page to another?
While the curl effect is a nice flourish to show off rendering algorithms and GPU performance, it really only works conceptually if we decide to limit the layout to fixed dimensions, to fit the constraints of old-world printing.
But do we need to do that?
Users will understand page-to-page navigation with any number of transition effects, many of which can accommodate dynamic layouts like push, wipe, and slide. And if the web is any indication, modern audiences quite readily understand page changes with no transition effect at all (though I still prefer them where practical, as an additional reinforcement).
If we adopt transitions more broadly suitable for the dynamic layouts that distinguish computing from physical media, we provide all of the cognitive affordance of a page curl, but in a form that can be applied to a broader range of circumstances and interactions, allowing us to build expectable consistency across the range of interactions our designs support.
Extra bonus points that most modern "flat" conventions, in terms of graphic appearance and animated transitions, turn out to be far simpler for both the programmer to craft and for the computer to deliver than yesteryear's visually and algorithmically heavier flourishes.
