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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I understand now that most software is slow because of co-tenancy reasons requiring controlling resources or simply because they're safely insulated from competition. e.g. GitHub is the former: you can give yourself a git host and CI/CD system that is much higher quality by yourself since you're probably not using its social features. I think things like Apple's five-finger inward gesture are the latter. Once you could do it and start typing but nowadays it needs to render the animation etc. before keystrokes register. This software is slow because you cannot replace it in MacOS.

But all these things will change in time. Hell is other people's software.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Windows used to have a checkbox somewhere to globally turn animations on or off.

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

The technical reason is you will not see all the animated beauty if it's fast, so animation forces feeds min delays for states transition

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