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“I made an operating system UI within Unity”

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Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#31

Post by _trampeltier »

outworlder wrote: post #23
0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

Lots of animations do serve a clear purpose. Humans are not used to things popping up into existence immediately out of nowhere. Yes, you may argue that you and me are tech savvy and trained our brains to not care as much. But that leaves everyone else. I think a bunch of animations shown in this piece are over the top. But quick animations can help immensely with usability. The best ones are so subtle that most peop…

I'm not so sure, if todays animation really have a clear purpose. Remember, when the animations on the Iphone calculater was so long, you often got the wrong result, because it did not get each pressed button (because the animation was so long). Also it can be very frustrating, if you are in a hurry.

And in Win 95 you still could choose all colors by yourself. Now you can say bright or dark an almost no app listen to it.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#32

Post by hbosch »

0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

Am I the only one who hates graphics on t-shirts? If the design doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something about the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in t-shirt design since Windows 95.

Ok, ok, I'm being dumb. And yeah, I tend to agree, but as a counterpoint: sometimes it's also just cool to have cool stuff. There is certainly a modernist fetish for superminimalism – HN being a locally favored example of a great social media website with no unnecessary frills – but I think your qualifier "serve a clear purpose" is not objective enough to be a good rule. What you and I think is a clear purpose are bound to be very different. I think a fade in/scaling animation for windows to appear and disappear is a better experience than just flickering them on and off – I think the clear purpose there is that it's cognitively less demanding when a window appears over the course of 200ms rather than 1ms. But hey, that's me.

What is the "clear purpose" of MacOS UI to have rounded corners, or the status bar to be translucent, or for the "genie" effect of minimizing an app. The truth is, animations have almost zero impact on the usability of an app or experience and only add to the perception of quality. Much like contrast stitching on the leather seat of your BMW, the reason it's there is simply because people think it's kinda nice to have and doesn't hurt anyone. Otherwise the only pants we'd be able to buy would be cargo pants... and no one likes cargo pants.

It's OK for stuff to exist that is "just neat".

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#33

Post by Miraste »

eberkund wrote: post #25
0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

My understanding is that animations came about as a way to make slow loading operations on web pages appear faster. Because they looked so elegant and fancy, designers started putting animations on software interfaces that should have otherwise been quick which leads to where we are today. Users also started demanding "smoothness" over speed, smoothness simply being how consistently the UI interactions behaved. On An…

Android has system-wide animation speed settings intended for development testing. I set them all to double speed, so now my phone has nice animations and a decent response time. Results may vary with slower phones.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#34

Post by cmcd »

mikepurvis wrote: post #21
0xffff2 wrote: post #19

Am I the only one who hates most animation? If the animation doesn't serve a clear purpose in signalling something to the user, I want it gone. I'm not convinced that we've seen any meaningful advance in OS UI design since Windows 95.

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

Why does MacOS only "sort of" have type-to-search?

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#35

Post by hbosch »

sixothree wrote: post #29
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more, especially with apps. Airbnb, Google Maps, Snapchat etc all have these fucking awful animations for each action. Makes the whole experience clunky on my mid level Moto phone. What was the point of all this advancing compute power if everything is still slow!!!

It is 2020 and everything is slow even on current gen technology. That is the most disappointing fact about the current state of technology.

The disappointing fact about the current state of mobile apps is that companies no longer think it's necessary to build two native apps.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#37

Post by jokoon »

loudandskittish wrote: post #18

I bet it runs smoother and uses less resources than anything written in Electron...

Here is an analysis of unity's performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y

My take on your comment is that the problem of electron is that it uses HTML.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#39

Post by wdobbels »

cmcd wrote: post #34
mikepurvis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

Why does MacOS only "sort of" have type-to-search?

AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#40

Post by MrLeap »

Years ago, when I was adapting field manuals into Unity Games -- I got asked to create some training for a piece of field kit that relied heavily on a windows mobile device (very early windows mobile, that had a registry -- could run some win32 apps, had a noticeable delay of like 350ms between every input and it reacting...)

I had that new-job-gotta-impress energy, so went _hard_ at this project. I added so many tiny details to make it _exactly like the windows mobile device_. I had simulated battery indicators, signal that was calculated by ray-crawling to the nearest in game "tower" and attenuating based on the materials it encountered along the way (why?!) -- every menu, function, submenu that I had access to I implemented. The power button worked, the restart button would do the windows mobile boot animation. No stone unturned.

When I finished it, I assume 6 people saw it, but they never said anything to me about it. That was probably my first adulthood jolt of ennui. Ah memories.

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