I agree with a whole lot of what you are saying, but I do think there is one non-fashion-trend reason to at least tone down skeumorphism, and that is pixel real estate. Drawing icons so that they look like realistic 3D objects requires more pixels. When you're on a phone with limited screen space, that's not the best idea. However, I'm not an absolutist here. Skeumorphism does help to clarify the meaning of things sometimes. If all you see is a colored rectangle, there's less that intuitively conveys interactivity suggestions such as 'you should push this'.

Hopefully things will tend to converge around a balanced approach.

I'm not against named arguments, but I hate the way they are delimited with space and colons. It would be readable if it were being used in a magazine article, but I find parsing its intent with my own eyes very difficult.

Here's my problem with it:

        -(void) what: (int) kind of: (int) bullshit isThis;

IMO, that is very difficult to read. And try doing a multi-file search for calls to it.

IDEs can overcome the search problem, but the readability problem remains.

Fine language in many ways but I call 'Boo' on the method syntax.

Obviously you hold the phone with your penis.

It's funny, I was going to list XCode as the biggest obstacle on the Mac. There are actually lots of great dev tools you get for free on the Mac... Shark, GuardMalloc, etc.

And to be fair, XCode does some things well. But the real meat and potatoes areas of development, Xcode is an absolute abomination.

Here's an example... I can't go to the expressions window and edit an existing expression. I also can't copy/paste that expression somewhere else to edit it. I can give up and use gdb: print x and that's ok I guess, but it's not a persistent, updated value.

Here's another example... When debugging in large projects with subprojects, when I try to dig down into data structs I often get messages that data fetch timed out. This is after sitting around with a beach-balled UI for several minutes.

I want to stress that I'm an equal opportunity critic btw. I have plenty of complaints about VS on Windows. But overall, XCode gets in my way and frustrates me far more than VS.