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Nevermarktoday at 6:26 AM3 repliesview on HN

> Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the opposite. Once you could do it and start typing but nowadays it needs to render the animation

There is no technical reason that animation should take that long.

Someone said, "good enough" and let it be visibly slow. The reasons for that could be anything, including non-performant code in dependencies, written by other people. But it just does not take much computing power by today's standards to composite code-generated animation.

Somehow, despite year after year of percentage-speed hardware improvements, there are cultural and structural reasons people ship code visibly slower than it needs to be. And faster compute appears to be irrelevant.


Replies

mrobtoday at 9:03 AM

Every visible UI animation is visibly slow. I've used MacOS computers before, and despite having hardware that benchmarks faster, they all feel slower than my old Linux desktop. The biggest reason for this is the animations.

arjietoday at 6:38 AM

Perhaps the real tragedy is not the animation. It is the fact that previously keystrokes would register even if the animation had not completed and now they do not. Interaction once you've entered a new mode should be instantaneous. Instead we are faced with inputs going neither to the old app nor to the new app. In the prior world, I could do the gesture and type the letters and hit Enter and the animation would not interrupt me from getting to my destination. Now I simply <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> and suffer the ignominy of a software system that does not care about my niche needs and is nonetheless beyond my present ability to modify while retaining all else.

jshiertoday at 6:44 AM

Making animations faster is one of the main reasons why, despite all the glass effect rendering, the 26 Apple OSes can feel faster than their previous versions. (Not always, of course.) They simply shortened the animations. The 27 versions do the same thing. Of course, this doesn't help all interactions, but it definitely improves the first impression.