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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Anybody feeling this kind of animations aren't bringing a lot to the table ? I was thrilled to watch lollipop material design (and even kitkat project butter), but it quickly faded (sic). Instant, simple interfaces are needed in many tasks where I don't enjoy or even have the luxury to waste time on distracting animations.

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That's a bit of the problem with showcases, they tend to look like 90s flash animations, but that doesn't mean that the intention is recreating the exact same effect on regular web pages. But once you build a generic tool, showing off every feature isn't necessarily a bad idea, even if spuriously using it would be.

But generally I agree, animations are easily overused. They're quite useful for showing (and sometimes hiding) UI elements, as this leads to a interface devoid of shock and surprise. Heck, I think I read something about that in a paper that predates the web…

Yeah, I said this in a general context, nothing against the linked project.

Last bit is interesting, animation can convey useful information, but mostly they're attention grabber. They have a place, but care is required.

I think there's value in these physics-based animations. Immediate motion is jarring ('temporal aliasing'), and ease-in/ease-out can feel really sluggish. Spring easing can be a lot more satisfying.

Totally agree, thanks for the idiom, it's critical to have continuous instead of discrete (especially if too disruptive) changes.

I don't understand why you wrote (sic) after a sentence of your own creation. AFAIK sic is used when you are quoting another person: if that quote includes a mistake of some kind, sic indicates that it was written or spoken as you have reproduced it. "Sic erat scriptum," meaning "thus it was written." [0]

[0] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#The_.22ironic_use.22_of_si...

This. Sometimes the animations and what not are distracting for the actual content. It's almost like the bad powerpoint transitions we had.

As a sidenote.. I'm currently working on a patch to CyanogenMod 12.1 that allows you turn off fancy animations (such option exists already when you turn on power save mode)

Yes. I agree. I too feel this kind of animation library should not be used where animation libraries make little or no sense to use them. In fact, I'd go a step further and agree that no animation libraries should be used when animation libraries are not needed, not even this one, which looks pretty neat.

Where should animation libraries be used? I'd think they should be used where a user would appreciate an animation. Such places could be while waiting for something to load, or maybe on a website dedicated to animation libraries. I think that would be an appropriate place for animations. It'd be weird if a website dedicated to animations didn't have animations on it.

websites for Kids is one of the places where animated UI can be used.

yes, I agree. kids love animations. adults don't like animations, except for creepy adults who watch cartoons and college kids that still watch The Simpsons.

Anything not time constrained, where thinking and subtle communication can take place. Otherwise the amount of animation can be reduced to a tiny bit without losing much. Or maybe for first times, so people can understand the flow of data through transitions between pages / frames / etc and when familiar, they can navigate through parts of the GUI without animation-helpers.

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