Comment by lynndotpy
1 day ago
Maybe you dislike them, but that does not make for a fact.
Instant transitions are something I strongly prefer and use in practice. There's no question, I don't want my operating system slowing itself down to a factor (literally) of 1000x, pointlessly fading and jiggling and sliding and bouncing and wiggling. And, as this article points out, animations in operating systems often make a visually illegible mess in the meanwhile.
Animations might be a good idea in theory, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to do them right.
Indeed: one of the first things I do on a new android phone is activate developer mode specifically so that I can set the animation timescale to 0×.
Which the majority of people think is a horrible experience. There's even a sibling comment in this thread pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518721
Unless you can back that up, "Majority" is something you're making up. It's a guess.
It also doesn't matter whether it's true if the majority or not- "Instant transitions are only good in theory" is not a true statement. Instant transitions are good in practice for many people and that has been true for decades.
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Most shoulder-surfers who see my phone ask me how everything's so fast, and get me to show them the settings. Being able to disable the extremely-excessive animations many things have nowadays is fantastic, and is a great reminder that hardware actually has made progress in the past two decades.
(I use accessibility -> reduce motion, personally. less flaky than the dev options, though also less reliable)
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Perhaps you should note the replies to that sibling comment
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Real life has everything "animated". Nothing happens in an instant, there is force required to accelerate mass, etc.
Short, well-done animations make for better UIs.
You're not operating the GUI by thought alone, so your muscles already provide the animation. Adding additional animation on top of that is unnatural.
This might be true, but the operating systems with animations you can't disable aren't short and they aren't well done.
> Short, well-done
This is the neglected key point. None of the examples were short or well-done.