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Comment by bruce343434 | Hacker News Reader

my takeaway from the article is I hope OP isn't responsible for that lag fest of an animation[0]. I hate embedded stuff that takes ages to animate while the hardware obviously just can't handle it. Skip the animation, and just make it snappy, damn it! There's nothing more infuriating than a slow interface that makes you wait needlessly.

[0] https://blog.benjamin-cabe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/re...

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OP here :) That animation is laggy on the Renode emulator (at the moment at least), but definitely snappy and 30fps on the real HW...

ah, good to hear! In that case act as if I said nothing :)

Off topic -> but on topic of the original post. Do you know if https://github.com/ocornut/imgui is available for embedded? It might be too much for the very low end but it for a reasonably capable system it's better than web or some high powered UI like Qt.

The coffee machine at the office has the laggiest animated interface and as a software developer it's just painful. They have complete control over the hardware and software so there is just no excuse.

What do you think happened there? Did the decision-makers never try using the product before it was manufactured? Were the stakeholders shown the "final product" on some high-powered prototype device?

The interface is very attractive -- high-resolution pictures of the various coffees, nice fonts, and a clean design. My guess is that graphic designers designed the images and interactivity without any considerations of performance. Then that design was given to developers to be shoe-horned into a machine not capable of handling it.

Possibly different teams contracted out to do both jobs. The design is done by one team, finished, and then handed off to the next.

I'm sure the interface could be tweaked (remove some animations, lower the resolution, etc) to make it usable but instead there was a complete failure of management and it was shipped as-is.

Been down this road many times:

- UI toolkit is cross platform (cough cough Qt, or Altia, or Crank) and runs great on the UX developer's x86 box. The UX guy loves fancy CSS transitions.

- Graphic assets are delivered in 32bit RGBA and the data cache chokes on the massive bit maps. And the cheap LCD is 565BGR so the CPU is constantly mixing channels. Then we discover the hardware has no alpha blending capability. More software load.

- Hardware gets cost reduced. Or the flagship platform gets the beefy CPU and the consumer versions get a Rockchip.

- RAM gets downsized or the project grows out of bounds and now we're blitting from QSPI flash.

- The whole system runs in JavaScript because that's what they can get out of the overseas development team, or it's too expensive to buy 2 more Qt seat licenses (or whatever the hell they want now. I think we're up to first-born children)

It all repeats, over and over.

This is even happening in video games now. See Gameface for example.

As the owner of the first company I worked for said when he was complaining about a product, "somebody said, 'fuck it, it's good enough' and shipped crap out the door."

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