They're like business strategies that boil down to "our strategy is to win". An opinionated product and an actual business strategy involve very deliberate decisions about what gets left on the table.
You're right on whether the source of light is on the same or opposite side. I'm assuming the light is coming from above you and with respect to the view, in front of it. http://mdznr.com/bJ The way, I think, you're talking about is if the light were to be coming from the user's chest (certainly not what's expected and not in the HIG).
The part that's backwards about Apple's implementation is that tilting the device (roll) should rotate the shines and tilting the device (pitch) should change the size of the shines. Apple's rotates on pitch and changes size on roll.
Coming from the user's chest isn't expected, but imagine a reading chair with the lamp over the user's shoulder, behind the chair. Same direction and a common scenario that I can imagine reproducing in software. How often do people place floor lamps directly in front of their chair?
If Apple's HIG says that the light source should always be directly ahead of you, then you are certainly correct. However, if straight ahead is 0 degrees then you can reproduce the opposite behavior (the effects of pitch and roll get swapped) by having the light source at 90 degrees (reading light beside the chair's right arm). The direction of shine rotation on the knob is reversed by having the light source 180 degrees from its current position (reading light beside the chair's left arm).
That's the thing: I wish more people would notify you when they use your open source stuff. Attribution means less to me than simply knowing that it's being used.
You should also be giving those avatars height attributes. When some of them load in slower (Also, I see you're loading them @2x, essentially), it shifts the formatting of the page a bit.
In the screenshot, the Close button provides context - it's a clue saying "this is what a normal button looks like". But it's still not straight-forward enough: you have to think in order to understand that. Without that context, how would a user know whether the light button indicates "click me to switch", or whether it means "I'm active right now"?
A good UI doesn't make you think in order to to understand what an element does.
The interface for iPhone and a lot of iPad apps would not benefit from a stylus. Buttons are huge. That Samsung device has teeny tiny buttons which requires a stylus. There are only two things I think that can benefit from a stylus and that is handwriting (do we really need to do this? It's slower, harder to read, and very constrained on a small device) and drawing (probably only necessary on iPad). Styluses also require you to hold the device in a new way. No more one handed use. You have to hold the device flat on a surface or in the palm of your secondary hand while you use this stylus in your dominant hand to point. Also, unlike a pencil or pen on paper, the small screen will not allow you to rest the side of your hand on a surface. I can't imagine how tiring it will be to keep your hand in this position for more than a few moments. I think you're mistaking something being different and temporarily fun to explore from something actually being better.
