TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A “senior” interface designer at Apple defended their skeuomorphic-tendencies:

I think it’s an important tool. The thing to remember is that UI design is like selling a restaurant, where you can’t just serve up good food in order to run a restaurant. You have to create an environment around the food that gets people in the mood to enjoy a really great meal: presenting the food really nicely, picking the right plates, the lighting on the table, the music that is playing. When you put all that together, it creates a much nicer experience than if you just were to serve up some good food.

Good argument, and one that I buy, but the problem is that many of these applications simply aren’t very good. Even if you strip away the leather from Calendar and the fake address book-look from Contacts, they’re not at all well-designed. Deleting contacts from Contacts on iPad requires selecting the contact, tapping edit, scrolling down, tapping “Delete,” and then confirming that you want to delete the contact. Adding events to Calendar is a similarly convoluted, time-consuming mess.

The faux-leather and faux-real life design of these applications only magnifies it. If they were good applications, it’d be a minor complaint at best. But they’re not.