It's nice to have frivilous things in our life where form overtakes function. But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. Nobody makes a fancy looking hammer (looking forward to the fancy hammer replies).
Martinez hammers are fancy, but they're not a case where form overtakes function. They have a reputation for excellent weighting and every part is replaceable. The colors are functional too in the sense that they make it easy to tell your hammer from someone else's on a job site.
I was just a few hours ago at the National Museum of Denmark, and they had a whole exhibit on ceremonial hammers in their prehistory floor. So there's that, I guess.
My fear is that we are in a world were there can only be a couple of unique device types, and thus only a couple of unique operating systems and UIs. So that even for professional (metaphorical) “hammer” users, the function will end up performed by the same device/os/ui that is also handing more consumer oriented functions. There will be tension in the UI needs of different functions, but the market for consumer functions is just so large, that the hammer function will lose and be forced to adopt an unsuitable ui.
“Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!”
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