Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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iPad OS (and iOS) has 1 major flaw and no one seems to be talking about it:

- The animations/effects etc take way too long. It is fatiguing to work on it because every action takes at least 2+ seconds with a dozen animations, each one lasting 100ms-300ms!

Try the following task yourself: Copy a piece of text from safari and create a new note in the Notes app, and paste it in there. While you're doing this, time it. Seriously, do it. And then do it 10 times. See how tired you get.

We need a completely new operating system with absolutely zero animations. You know what happens when you launch vim from CLI? It starts up. No animations. CLI is a pain to work with at times, but this aspect is so critical to putting a smile on the users face. Everything would instantly become insanely fast.

I understand the value of animations - they're there to provide context, where something slides in and slides out from. This is fine for iPhone. But not for a workstation. I also understand that I can disable motion in accessibility settings but it still doesn't disable all of them. Also, that's not the default so that's a moot point.

This is such a low hanging fruit to speed up things, but alas, we have UX/UI designers that insist on "sleek" and "sexy" UX/UI without delving into the fundamentals of what makes a product or software pleasant to use. While you're at it, you'd also improve the UX - battery life because you're not churning transparency effects and motion blur through the GPU pipes. Yes, battery life is "UX" IMO.

> The animations/effects etc take way too long. It is fatiguing to work on it because every action takes at least 2+ seconds with a dozen animations, each one lasting 100ms-300ms!

You're absolutely correct and i wholeheartedly concur with you on all this. i'd add Mac OS X (at least Catalina) to that as well, stuff like switching virtual desktops shows an animation and there's no way AFAICT to disable it.

Unless there's serious computation/data-transfer (including over a network) happening, i feel like computer user-interfaces really shouldn't have human-perceptible latency; and even then, only the specific component that's requiring computation/data-transfer should get latency'd, it's inexcusable for a whole system to get slow because one application is doing a lot.

> The animations/effects etc take way too long. It is fatiguing to work on it because every action takes at least 2+ seconds with a dozen animations, each one lasting 100ms-300ms!

> We need a completely new operating system with absolutely zero animations.

Whoa, there's a big gap between "there are too many animations" and "we need a completely new OS". There are a lot of good things about iOS that I'd hate to throw out with this bathwater. I'd much rather fix this problem than throw up my hands and start over.

(As to fixability—macOS, for example, let's you turn off animations for app openings, and I think iOS's "reduce motion", or whatever it is called, helps here, too—although I don't have an iDevice handy to test, [EDIT] and I see now elsewhere in this thread you aren't happy with it.)

There is a “Reduce Motion” setting in iOS that speeds some things up a little bit.

I knew this would come up, thus I already addressed it in my comment above. That's not the default. And it still doesn't feel good - because animations are at the core of the UX/UI of Apple software. IMO the software needs to be designed from ground up with strict understanding of productivity and less marketing/design/aesthetics/animation. "Reduce motion" seems like an after thought hidden deep in the accessibility settings.

Why should it be the default ?

Animations help less experienced users understand what is going on and the relationships between objects. Plus they just make the experience more interesting and fun. An important aspect if you're newer and have to spend time climbing the learning curve.

And Apple gave expert users, who aren't their core audience, a two click way to switch it all off. So not sure what more you want from them.

Agree. I'm annoyed that Apple does not enable us to disable animations entirely (right?), but would not argue for it as a default.

Yeah you’re right, animations are not needed. Nor is a gui. Just give people a keyboard and a terminal window, that’s all you really need. No fuss no muss. Imagine how much time people will save once they master the VIM key bindings. Much more efficient am i right?

Then you'd have IBM AS/400 :) Those things are used in airline ticketing, certain large grocery stores, semiconductor fabs and manufacturing MRPs systems for WIP tracking, and logistics industry - when you need speed and no bullshit. It is archaic but works faster than any Javascript app you can build. IMO this is a very underappreciated UI that needs more praise. Intel's, Global Foundries, TSMC factories (fab + assembly) run on IBM AS/400 I believe. I have anecdotal information about large companies switching to contemporary systems with nothing but dissatisfaction from the employees that actually use this system, 8 hours a day for many years.

UI: https://i0.wp.com/as400i.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/main...

I don’t know about the other cases you mention but the AMADEUS terminals don’t seem very efficient. You ask the woman at the counter to change seats and mashes away at the keyboard for a good minute before she tells you there’s no seats sorry.

But in any case, we’re really talking about ipads, 99% of users buy them precisely because of the friendly UI with its animations. Efficiency is the last thing on their mind.

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