Apple Designers Sick Of Doing Things Steve Jobs' Way Just Scored A Big Win (AAPL)

Steve Jobs loved software interfaces that mimicked design from the offline, non-software world.

This type of software design is called skeuomorphism.

There's a faction of designers at Apple that hate it.

One former Apple designer recently told Fast Company's Austin Carr that skeuomorphism is "visual masturbation."

"It’s like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?"

One popular target of anti-skeuomorphs has always been iBooks, with its virtual wooden bookshelf and fancy page-turning animation.

Well, chalk up a win for this crowd.

Apple just announced a new feature for iBooks: users can turn off page-turning, and have scroll through books instead.

We love good design and good design debates.

But what really interesting here is watching how Apple moves forward in a post-Steve Jobs era. His taste made the company what it is, but Apple can't try to adhere to it too strictly without him around, or else the whole place will grow sclerotic.

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