Why I dislike Modern UI

This resonates with me (though is terse on proposed solutions). As an example of a very effective UI, I use vim with multiple buffers, ctrl-p and ctags in a largish c/c++ project. It lets me fly around the code effortlessly. My colleagues are pointing and clicking through tabs in sublime text. Sure sublime is probably faster to learn, but it certainly has a lower upper bound on performance.

I would love to see the keyboard used more in modern interfaces, the discrete nature of keys can make for a crisp experience compared with the finely quantized continuous space that is the domain of the mouse. Think of problems like hunting for the right place to grab and divide a window border, key combinations could get you the same result without the hunt.

For me, the criticism is pretty specific:

  When I see these modern interfaces and 
  all these animations/transitions

Probably because it resonates with me. The experience is that someone else has decided what the perfect amount of time I should wait to do what I want to do...someone I don't know who does not know what I am actually trying to do (something for which using the UI is only an incidental step).

Over my years in design, I've see a pretty regular pattern when someone walks through their design for a project that boils down to: the user arrives here and is forced to do X. Narrowing down the user's possibilities via force is probably a reasonable backup strategy for parts of a penitentiary. Most of the time, I find good design creates possibilities.

So for me, the brevity is warranted because the problem is so fundamental. A couple of years ago I opened up my copy of AutoCad R14 from the early 1990's in a VM to goof around. It was radically different: type a command and it executes instantly. Modern UI's have the tail wagging the dog. There is latency in web interfaces due to round trips over the network. Animations can be a way of papering over that latency in lieu of not stalling while waiting for data. They are not an independent end...good design addresses actual problems.

I used macOS and I'm not sure of others. I'm not totally against animations on Modern UI. But I think it is used heavily in certain places like twitter for example. The profile parallax transition and other animations is kinda laggy when I'm on the low-end processing machines. Also Airbnb's new design and Apple's product pages are heavy if I'm on a slow network. Animation/transition are mostly used to cover the slow network latency. Also most people think that it is fancy to use animations rather than solving a problem. I think design should be consistent across devices and networks, showing a different design for users on a slow internet connection is kinda ugly.