Until the recent shakeup at Apple, with longtime exec Scott Forstall being shown the door, I'd never heard of skeuomorphic design. Forstall, who headed iOS development, greatly favored this approach to design. As did Steve Jobs. But the new top iOS guy, legendary designer Jony Ive, dislikes it. That may mean that iOS will lose skeuomorphism in the future. So what exactly might we be losing? The tendency of Apple's apps to resemble real-world objects. Think of the bookshelf in iBooks. Or the notepad metaphor in the Notes app. Or the leather-bound book appearance of Contacts. And on and on.