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Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#141

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

nodamage wrote: post #70
usaphp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially the lag that you see on some brand new cars, only BMW and Audi seem to have lag free interface, but anything else that involves touch interface is just horrid! I've recently sat in my friend's brand new Honda SUV and the interface lag is just plain silly, for a car that costs $30,000+. Why is that?

Same with in-flight entertainment systems on planes. They always have terrible, slow interfaces.

Most of the newer ones I see these days are just Android tablets with capacitive digitizers and a pretty decent shell.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#142

Post by ma2rten »

dmsnell wrote: post #125
ma2rten wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there were car reviews out there that take software quality in account in particular for things like lane keep assist. When I was in the market for a car the reviews that I have seen only mention if they have the feature, not how well it actually works.

For what it's worth, there's a specific distinction for software systems like lane assist. The bar for "working" is so high that if it doesn't essentially work perfectly we can't say it works at all. We would expect reviews to point out if a feature such as lane assist fails or has noteworthy failures (such as rapid weaving inside the lane) but maybe not so much if it works properly.

I currently have a Honda Civic with lane keep assist. It doesn't slow down before curves and disengages frequently. Tesla's autopilot works much better from what I have seen.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#143

Post by frankmoodie »

Akujin wrote: post #18
eropple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thinking--and I'm not sure I agree with it, but it doesn't seem that objectionable--is that, while the HTML/CSS/JS separation makes a lot of sense for documents , it does not necessarily make as much sense for applications . HTML is just being used as a rendering language, not as a content description language, if that makes sense? And so the split between them might not make as much sense. As a template engine (…

So 100% agree. I haven't found something I've enjoyed working with in JavaScript. The environment I work on usually has very clean MVC and the issue is always that the designers I work with don't know javascript but need control over the HTML so I'm always taking their raw HTML with almost no javascript and basically reworking the HTML & CSS to do the animations or w/e is necessary. I've tried React but generally I j…

"but generally I just get very dirty .JS files with mixed HTML/CSS in them"

Just put the css/sass on .css/.sass files and import the classes from the react jsx file. No need to mix css and html.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#145

Post by nom »

makecheck wrote: post #26

Interface performance is one of the strangest problems to have in this age of crazy processing power but it is extremely common. Some of the delay is just plain silly and avoidable, like having long and synchronous opening animations in response to an action, which only serve to waste the user’s time. (Oh how I love being on a web site like AT&T and watching their JavaScript poorly zoom open a blank box from the cent…

That reminds me:

I have a Siemens washing machine, and the interface have a latency of >500 ms. How they fucked it up is way beyond me. It consists of nothing more than a rotary switch, four buttons and three 7-segment LED displays.

I've played with the thought of disassembling the firmware just to see how they fucked this up this bad. I could never make something this unresponsive even if I tried.

It's utterly fascinating and pisses me of every time I do the laundry.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#146

Post by crooked-v »

taeric wrote: post #138
noblethrasher wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acceleration is important, but the “pop” that they wanted was probably some form of the “squash and stretch” effect that we all subconsciously associate with good quality animation[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_and_stretch

That makes sense. Curious that we think it is quality animation.

Why is it "curious"? It's a direct consequence of attempting to emulate how non-rigid bodies (including people) move in the real world.

For a contrast of what happens when there's no squash and stretch in animation, take a look at pretty much everything ever made by Hanna-Barbera before 1990. Everything remains almost pathologically on-model all the time to reduce animation costs.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#147

Post by taeric »

crooked-v wrote: post #146
taeric wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. Curious that we think it is quality animation.

Why is it "curious"? It's a direct consequence of attempting to emulate how non-rigid bodies (including people) move in the real world. For a contrast of what happens when there's no squash and stretch in animation, take a look at pretty much everything ever made by Hanna-Barbera before 1990. Everything remains almost pathologically on-model all the time to reduce animation costs.

Most rigid things do not snap and stretch. Phones, paper, books.

People will act that way. Some things will compress. Certainly not all things, though. So, is curious if it is always seen as better.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#148

Post by intrasight »

Sanddancer wrote: post #78
intrasight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But your server has to render it for the thousands of visitors to you site. I still don't get the rationale.

Smart rendering would involve using a mostly static template that's updated with the relatively few dynamic elements as the page is being readied to be sent over the wire. If 90% of your dynamic content is the same, why put that through your app processes at all?

Static stuff is static at either end, and doesn't add to rendering time.

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#149

Post by zaroth »

joezydeco wrote: post #116
Matthias247 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, the software quality in these things is often quite cruel, and even a mediocre javascript framework might perform awesome against it. I've seen enough things things like handcoded UI frameworks in C++ (in order to be fast), and then doing things like blocking network calls on the main thread from there. Some newer systems are based on QT or Android. These typically have better performance, because…

I recently got a Mazda3, their newer MazdaConnect system is running an iMX6 (dual CortexA9 w/GPU and video accelerators) and uses Opera as the interface. All of the core UI is written in Javascript. It's also highly hackable. =)

But how's the lag?

Re: Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React

#150

Post by zaroth »

knodi123 wrote: post #98
makecheck wrote: post #26

Interface performance is one of the strangest problems to have in this age of crazy processing power but it is extremely common. Some of the delay is just plain silly and avoidable, like having long and synchronous opening animations in response to an action, which only serve to waste the user’s time. (Oh how I love being on a web site like AT&T and watching their JavaScript poorly zoom open a blank box from the cent…

> like having long and synchronous opening animations in response to an action, which only serve to waste the user’s time. Oooooh, don't get me started on DVD menu screen navigation. What shambling, drooling idiot decided that it was critical for me to watch an unskippable spoiler-rich montage of scenes from the entire length of the movie before I can click "Play Film", followed by another unskippable montage afterwa…

There's a great infographic showing the UX of playing a DVD vs playing a pirated video. Exactly this.
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