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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)

iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.

You're welcome.

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Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.

I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.

My 70 year old relatives seem to have no problem finding the setting that makes everything on the phone 2x bigger. Probably because Apple is good at this and offers it up as an option in the OS onboarding and after every major update.

It’ll be fine.

On Mac OS the first significant thing on screen after turning it on for the first time are the accessibility settings with screenshots and animations to explain every option. You can also access those options with the Spotlight search, typing "tran" will give you the "reduce transparency" toggle directly in the search results without having to open settings first (though to be fair the search indexing is a bit lacking, like on iOS - the animation toggle is called "reduce motion" and so it can't be found via typing in "animation").

Apple designs stuff this way on purpose. They think it's neat to "discover" something that should be obvious. The new camera app is a perfect example of this. No indication that swiping up from the bottom brings up a menu for camera controls. The fact any of these obviously terrible design and implementation choices are praised is baffling.

You can also disable animations on iOS.

When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.

macOS is awful in so many places. I would prefer if they had an option to disable only some of the animations. "Show Desktop" is so sudden and zoomy I almost get motion sickness, but Mission Control is more subtle and really helps me figure out which window is which.

My strategy for multiple desktops is to not use them at all. But I'm enjoying the comfort of a 43" screen, so all the windows I need just fit.

IMHO iOS strikes an almost perfect balance. It animates things in response to continuous drag gestures (notification centre, app switching), but almost nothing else. Maybe macOS could take a page from that book? E.g. dragging the menu bar; the animation plays out in direct response to user action.

I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.

They're not [always] about hiding loading times. Even switching from an app to the desktop screen has a slow animation, or switching back and forth between two running apps.

That explanation makes no sense in this case. The workspace transition animation takes a full second, on extremely performant devices that can keep up their pace up until the OS swaps around 15GB, at which point animations start lagging so they actually make it even worse. Meanwhile a Linux setup will switch workspaces instantly. Same for Windows 11 if you turn off animations, by the way.

This animation slows every transition by one second including entering and leaving fullscreen mode, because on Mac OS fullscreen works by moving the window to a new workspace. There is no justification for this.

> You can also disable animations on iOS.

No, you can not. You can reduce _some_ animations, but most of them actually remain. Including the most annoying ones like the slowwwww screen switching, or the bottom sheet animation.

An amusing anecdote: I have animation turned off entirely on my Android phone, and I was demoing an app on it. People commented how amazingly fast it felt compared to iOS, simply because there were no animations.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle and would not need such a setting: see for yourself in this image found by Googling https://i0.wp.com/morrick.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/001-....)

Thanks.

Transparency confuses me regularly - and I then waste cycles trying to understand why a particular heading has a strange colour before I work out it is bleeding through from some unobvious background thing.

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