This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
We just need to add more sound effects tied to system monitor probes to get those HDD noises back, kinda like how electric cars have that parking lot noise to make sure pedestrians are aware of them in lieu of an engine banging away!
Being inside the computer like being at a pipe organ console, or surrounded by screens like a hacker in a dystopian hovercraft!
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
It seems like the developer is Japanese (the dev log is in Japanese according to the readme) so for once I am willing to believe this is a case of “the dev is not a native speaker” - but yes, I wondered several times reading the readme if this whole thing is vibe coded
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
I thought Maverick reduced the skeuomorphism, I was glad to see it removed. Apple had got to a point where shadows and reflections weren't consistent between icons and windows and the Dock. Briefly, Microsoft lead good design with Metro and the flat, minimal background noise.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously?
If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
Singular and plural chassis are spelled the same, but that doesn't make it right! I'm more inclined to spell it chassises personally.
We just need to add more sound effects tied to system monitor probes to get those HDD noises back, kinda like how electric cars have that parking lot noise to make sure pedestrians are aware of them in lieu of an engine banging away! Being inside the computer like being at a pipe organ console, or surrounded by screens like a hacker in a dystopian hovercraft!
Hey you may like this project: https://github.com/AdoPi/wlgblock
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
> If you like bland modern design, great,
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
>if you like bland, that should be an option too
That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.
What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)
e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.
I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.
This warms my heart.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
> It's impossible to activate them now
There's easy jailbreak options to bypass the activation for those and have a functional device, nowdays.
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
Most people are to one degree or another.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
The README being so full of AI prose is super grating.
It seems like the developer is Japanese (the dev log is in Japanese according to the readme) so for once I am willing to believe this is a case of “the dev is not a native speaker” - but yes, I wondered several times reading the readme if this whole thing is vibe coded
> the kind iOS 6 had
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
I thought Maverick reduced the skeuomorphism, I was glad to see it removed. Apple had got to a point where shadows and reflections weren't consistent between icons and windows and the Dock. Briefly, Microsoft lead good design with Metro and the flat, minimal background noise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
https://www.macworld.com/article/222218/get-to-know-os-x-mav...
> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
I like when designers are creative.
This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
But will this make a billion dollars and let me force my bizarre beliefs on the world?
I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
Personally, I found skeuomorphic design to be something that I really enjoyed, for a couple of days, but rapidly got sick of.
That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.
I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.
What's so bad about it?
http://toastytech.com/guis/desk.html
> DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word
They dropped the ball:
DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.
Or go full acronym with Kit for the K as in "Developer Kit".
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
Flashback to TabWorks.
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
Did it have that tiny rollerball on the side?
We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.
Sorry, that doesn't look like a walnut desk. That looks like stained pine wood.
Amazing and beautiful, I love it! I'm working on something similar so it gives me ideas.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
This will be the chance of the Linux desktop to thrive.
In the past ui development was so hard and none of the app developers had the expertise or appetite to do it properly.
LLMs changed that overnight. A good engineer can build great UI for their app.
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
A “dog-eared corner” in fact. The readme is painful to read if you have an aversion to Claude prose.
I'd be into something as useful as Quartz Composer was for Desktop Widgets, but not a full skeuomorphic desktop.
Indigo Magic or CDE is as close as I'd want to go with that concept.
2004 was a long time ago, and I suppose what is old can be new (again).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQPTtdzBig
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
Exactly what it reminded me of. Although a lot more functional.
I thought we were done with the skeuomorphism craze back in the late 00s. (Thanks Apple). Is the trend coming back?
> Is the trend coming back?
Hopefully no.
Wrong abstraction! I love it… But wrong abstraction!
Do you want your desktop to feel like a 90s adventure mystery game by Sierra.. Well boy do I have the desktop for you!
That's a no for me - it seems like it would be a bear to use for more then 5 minutes.
I'm not sure if I feel the same way about skeuomorphism as a general design philosophy. Maybe this is just the wrong metaphor?
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
HN crowd be like: THANKS GOD APPLE WILL NEVER OPEN-SOURCE THE DE SO WE CAN'T HAVE THEMES FOR INDIVIDUALS WHO WANTS THEM
themes are actually possible on macos
https://github.com/CoreBedtime/playground
I can imagine this being really helpful for beginners and kids. It's hard to grok what windows and tabs are etc. without any context.
This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.
This is pretty cool! I'd use this, once out of beta.
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
That control panel looks fantastic! Too bad I don't wayland. Last I checked, Mathematica doesn't like it.
This looks like peak skeuomorphism. I like it, but ray-tracing the desktop sounds like overkill.
I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
Looks like an 80s video game.
nice! would be cool to customize to different era's of office life ... or even a creative version, e.g. Picasso's desktop
How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
Welcome back, Microsoft Bob!
I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.
Fun, makes me think of Bumptop :)
Yes. I hope it lasts longer.
I am skeptical that a transition from X to Wayland is actually merited.
As for the post / the repo itself, this analysis:
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/50103338
suggests it is LLM-generated. Not sure what to make of it.
fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
It feels like UI design froze somewhere in the mid-2010s. There are some changes here and there, but it all looks similar and very bland.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I blame Windows 8 and, especially, Windows 10 for popularizing this extremely bland and boring design.
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
BeOS of 2026?
Coupled with steam frame headset this might be great experience.
Please tell me it has coffee ring stains and spiral lined notebooks.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
Sweet
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously? If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
okay, now use this for a month and report back
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man
god please no
Please no, seriously, fuck skeumorphism. There's a reason everybody stopped using it.
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
Personally I don't super care if a designer thinks I'm being tacky if its making my day to day more fun.