Retro design is crippling innovation

What other 'retro' tech hasn't changed much? The automobile?

What a calendar should be, if we're going to truly abolish the tragedy of skeuomorphism, is a smoothly flowing timeline, with you at the front, diminishing logarithmically into the future. This way, you can clearly see your appointments. Should make the author happy.

The point is, sometimes we need to artificially break things up into manageable pieces. We think in milestones - the beginning of a season, midnight as a landmark showing how late you're staying up. Some skeuomorphic designs are only "incidentally" skeuomorphic, in that they solve a problem the right way, and just happen to resemble how people used to solve that problem.

Unfortunately, the "old-fashioned, physical object" this design is based on is the human brain, or more precisely, the useful cultural artifacts that happen to be engrained in pretty much all the human brains on the planet. The monthly and weekly calendar reflects how we think about time. You think you can stop me from thinking in weeks and months by changing one calendar application? You'd have to work a little harder than that. Here's what you need to do:

1. Stop my company from scheduling my paychecks to coincide with the beginning and middle of each month. Stop them from organizing my work days into groups of five days in the middle of groups of seven, and stop people where I work from informally scheduling things with respect to month boundaries.

2. Do the same to the companies that employ all the people I occasionally synchronize my social schedule with.

3. Stop all the businesses I use from scheduling lessons and classes on a monthly basis and varying their hours on a weekly basis. Persuade the state government that it should be as easy to buy liquor on Sunday as on any other day. (That should be easy once you've abolished the days of the week; see 5.)

4. Detach holidays from dates. It would be so much nicer if Thanksgiving was the 329th day of the year instead of the fourth Thursday in November. That way I could forget about months and weeks, and my online calendar could make better use of screen space. (Again, this will follow easily once you've accomplished number 5.)

5. Abolish the days of the week and the months of the year. Prevent anyone from referring to Monday, Tuesday, January, etc., or to weeks and months at all, so I never have to think, "We're shipping on the first Monday of next month. How many days until then?"

After all that, I'll no longer want a calendar app that orients me with respect to weeks and months. You can get rid of your "skeuomorph," and I won't mind that my calendar app gives me no visual, non-verbal cues about what day of the week or week of the month it is.

So, sarcasm aside, you DO need to show month boundaries. It is not helpful to propose doing away with the one convention for that without proposing any replacement for it.

Also, it is not helpful to propose doing away with the past entirely. People are oriented by the past as well as by the future. Oh, dear, it's been a week since I told Doug that information would be available soon. I had better drop him a line and explain that it's delayed. My tooth has been hurting ever since I went to the dentist; how long has that been? When's the last time I worked out?

Showing the past is a valuable function! If you don't recognize that showing the past is part of the function of the calendar, then criticizing a calendar for showing too much of the past rings a little hollow, because you aren't balancing the valuable functions of the interface. You're just picking one and throwing out another.

A better statement of the problem is that the visual clues for month boundaries are the top and bottom of the displayed grid of days on the screen, and therefore the past to present ratio varies dramatically through the month. During some parts of the month, you see very little of the past, and during other parts of the month, you see very little of the future.

A useful suggestion would be to detach month boundaries from the edges of the displayed grid and show them in some other way, perhaps by using color or shading. That way you can keep the balance of past to present close to an optimum value. Perhaps the current week can be the second or third from the top. I'm not a UI designer, but I think that is a more useful analysis of the problem, even if I didn't show off a new word I learned a few weeks ago from a magazine article.

Worst case is when trying to highlight, as a single mark (with note attached), a section of text which spans more than 2 pages (esp. when a "page" is a large-font phone-screen size): I can't tap-and-drag from one end of the section to then next because the "page" paradigm intervenes. Web page? word processing? no problem, we're used to highlighting via scrolling. E-book? scroll? nope, gotta match that page-flipping animation.