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Posted by ravenical 8 hours ago

Every Frame Perfect(tonsky.me)
279 points | 89 commentspage 2
flyingshelf 5 hours ago|
This is the kind of things that bother me when using software and unfortunately almost every software is affected.

I just look at the largest tech companies in the world that with their unlimited finances cannot produce software that isn't glitchy like this.

sam1r 5 hours ago||
I feel like OP brought up a good problem to solve, with no solution. I dream of the days where posts like these end with "5 ways to better execute on this today".

Instead, we get a zooming in/out raccoon (making fun of the reader, IMO) for recognizing this problem via the OP author.

Maybe it's just a really hard problem to solve across all devices & latencies... Perhaps more time needs spent on "problem solving" vs "problem description".

keane 2 hours ago|
The expectations set for what turns out to be an article without solutions are also raised by the title the author chose. Show us these mythical perfect frames?
skybrian 4 hours ago||
These seem like low-priority bugs to spend time on? Most apps have bigger problems.
layer8 3 hours ago|||
The issue is that we didn’t have these kinds of incongruent animations twenty years ago, and nowadays they are the norm, worsening user experience.
ChrisLTD 4 hours ago||
These aren’t bugs in the traditional sense. They built the animation system to work like this, and replaced the old system that didn’t produce these psychedelic transition states.
skybrian 3 hours ago||
Is there more about what they did somewhere else? I don’t see any implementation details in the article.
jadar 4 hours ago||
I think a lot of these are because Apple has built animations into their products as first-class citizens, but that means that they need to somehow figure out how to compose them well. (Which obviously is a rather difficult problem to solve!) In my experience, you end up spending a lot more time trying to get all of the animations to work well together than you do on creating the actual UI, and that time is just not worth it if your start and end states are beautiful and intuitive. There's also the cross-UI-framework tax that has come up since Apple has allowed mixing SwiftUI and (App|UI)Kit, and animations are part of that.
ezst 1 hour ago|
I'd slightly rephrase that as "Apple has recently started building pointless animations into their product, instead of sticking to meaningful animations like they were doing since unmemorable times".

Old Apple knew not to overdo things.

satvikpendem 4 hours ago||
An app with no animations at all is going to feel terrible. You can test this out yourself, if you have an Android you can set animation speed to 0x in the developer settings. It is jarring to see instant changes and it actually takes your brain a second to process what happened, and that process is probably slower than having the animation in the first place.

I have mine at 0.5x and that feels sufficient, still fast but I can see apps opening and closing etc.

lynndotpy 19 minutes ago||
An app with no animations feels awesome. It's great and it doesn't take my brain any time to process what happened since I already knew what was going to happen when I press the button that makes things happen on purpose.
bvrmn 4 hours ago|||
I'm a happy user of android with animations turned off. It's the only mean to make it somewhat "snappy". IMHO lag is always worse than lack of fancy transient state in input -> UI change context.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago|||
After using Android for like a decade, I eventually succumbed and got a iPhone 12 Mini (back when it was new). I still miss the ability of turning off animations as I could do on Android, and I'm 110% my current phone would feel 200% faster if I could just turn off every damn animation that just exists to exists. I'd much rather have a second to process if that's needed (which I don't think it is), than being slowed down by one second every time an app changes the page, everything feels like molasses when you navigate around.
yellow_lead 4 hours ago|||
Not for me, I always turn off animations. It feels fine for me, and I can operate the phone a lot quicker without having to wait for animations to complete.
intrikate 4 hours ago||
I don't turn them off entirely, I kind of enjoy the feeling of momentum animated elements can provide, but I definitely do go in and speed them up massively. I find that when a phone is feeling unresponsive or sluggish, it's usually because I'm moving two steps ahead of the animation and it has to catch up. Feels like tripping on your own feet.
ryukoposting 3 hours ago|||
I have mine at 0.5x.

The problem with 0x is that it seems to only affect like 90% of the UI. Certain things still animate, and the cadence feels awful as a result.

At 0.5x the stuff that's mysteriously unaffected by the animation speed setting isn't as jarring.

I would use 0x if it worked properly.

saati 4 hours ago|||
All animations are just wasted time while you can't properly interact with the UI, it's much better to just turn every one of them off.
ivanjermakov 4 hours ago||
Give it one day and you won't come back to those sluggish animations slowing your intent down.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago||
I have it at 0.5x. 0x is just not smooth enough, plus sometimes apps actually don't load fast enough so you're stuck waiting for them anyway.
genxy 2 hours ago||
The title reminds me of The Simpsons, watch an episode and pause it. Unlike live action, every frame of The Simpsons is art. It is almost unbearable to internalize the sheer volume of purposely constructed images that The Simpsons is sending at you. Gluttonous in scale.
boredatoms 5 hours ago||
This explains why I feel compelled to turn off any animation whenever there is a toggle to do so
notglossy 2 hours ago||
Animation should convey meaning, not achieve pixel-perfect morphs between states.

When iOS first launched, some of the brilliance was in how UI elements transformed into one another—a title in the title bar becoming a "back" button on the left, for instance. There were no intricate morphs, just a simple cross-dissolve between two elements shown briefly at the same time. It read as meaningful without being literal.

The Crop/Adjust example doesn't hold up here, because the two modes don't share a focus. The crop animation is deliberately different: it emphasizes the cropping controls at the edges of the image that you might otherwise miss, prepping you visually for the task and tying the controls into the image workspace. Adjust mode has no direct controls on the image itself, so the transition out should differ. The mismatch is the point, not a flaw.

For most UI, you don't need pixel-perfect morphs between small elements. The real job of animation and behavior is to convey meaning and context. Make your transitions pixel-perfect and most people would never notice the difference.

Animats 1 hour ago||
Now I have to get Ubuntu/Wayland/winit/wgpu/rend3/egui/wine to work.
ylisav 2 hours ago|
What a rare creature, an article without AI mentioned in it! Thanks for sharing
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