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Every Frame Perfect

tonsky.me

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Re: Every Frame Perfect

#221

Post by fenomas »

jchw wrote: post #211
fenomas wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what TFA is about though. Look at the youtube example - it has two pieces of UI animating from from a start point to an end point, and the paths are such that they momentarily overlap. There's nothing buggy or janky about it in motion; TFA is just saying that if you ignore the motion and take a screenshot mid-transition it looks odd. Same complaint as what GP describes, and silly for the same reasons.

It's what I personally took away from it. I was also someone who had the same feeling when I first heard Wayland's "every frame is perfect" mentality. I thought, "This is probably a good idea on multiple levels." I agree the YouTube example isn't the worst one, but also at the same time, I don't agree with you that there is nothing buggy or janky about it. https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/youtube@1x.png?t=.…

I see what you're getting at, but I think you're focusing on the incidental. An animation is good if it's clear and intuitive in motion. It may often be the case that good animations also look nice in a screenshot halfway through, but (a) they don't always, and (b) working well in motion is obviously the more important of the two goals.

As such it makes no sense to worry about the latter thing - it's not a signal whether the animation is good or not.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#222

Post by SarthakGaud »

ezst wrote: post #109
SarthakGaud wrote: post #93

New Principle and I love it, however its hard to do on move dynamic and populated sites like youtube. Gonna follow this from my next project.

Re: YouTube example, the issue (as I understand it, and I'm what you could describe as the opposite of an expert in that) is that the video and the playlist blend with transparency over one another. Had the playlist appeared sliding from the right side of the screen, it would have worked (I guess).

yes what you described is how it is right now on youtube, the main reason is to make it look more fluid and natural, apple examples shown mostly work because the overall structure is very static and have a lot of negative spacing. More animations tend to negate the principle described if not done with extreme care.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#223

Post by saratogacx »

fasterik wrote: post #116
mrandish wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I initially thought "Every Frame Perfect" meant a strict avoidance of any jank or stutter in motion, which I'm fully on-board for but as a film, video and 3D technologist, you're spot on calling out motion blur and similar temporal artifacts. In motion, they not only look 'most correct' to the human visual system, they are the most interpretable. Adding the correct blur to motion makes it appear clearer but seen as a…

Regarding your last point, I think it's almost always wrong to move something discontinuously, but I do think designers should think a lot more about getting out of the way of the user. A 50-100 ms animation is more than enough for most motions and keeps the UI feeling snappy. Also, animation should be decoupled from input wherever possible. I hate it when I have to sit there waiting for an animation to complete befo…

Animations on software are infuriatingly slow these days. I turn on dev mode on my android phone for 2 settings. DPI and double animation speed. Simply to compensate for software design taking up too much space and time. On windows I turn animations off for the same reason. Just let me use the thing.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#224

Post by makapuf »

jesse__ wrote: post #77
fasterik wrote: post #55

I agree that some of the examples the author provided are instances of bad animation. But I don't agree with the premise of the article. Computer graphics is all about exploiting features of the human visual system. We perceive things differently when they're moving vs. when they're standing still. It's very possible that a "wrong" frame in isolation is the best looking one in a real-time context. We can also pick ap…

I like this comment. The idea that animations should be able to be picked apart frame by frame and always be coherent doesn't make much sense, because the user will never actually do that. I do like the point the article makes about using ui fidelity as a proxy for software quality, and agree that they pointed out some bad animations. But, I think you hit the nail on the head .. frame by frame coherence isn't the bes…

Exactly, you should optimize for quality and have a high bar forbit but I'm not sure sacrificing framerate for pixel perfect rendering or perfect subpixel antialiasing and compositing a perfect glass chroma aberration when wheezing a superfast animation is more important than it being solid 144Hz or audio synced.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#225

Post by silon42 »

helterskelter wrote: post #106
lukeschlather wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS shouldn't be making many big changes that force me to reorient. When I'm moving between different UIs I often want to compare them; animations make it harder to compare state A to state B. I can detect very fine differences between two images by switching between them within a second, if there's a 1-second animation it not only means it's going to add a second, it adds a bunch of visual noise which might make…

Try using a tiling window manager. I generally dislike animation in my UI, but when a window, especially an unexpected one opens up and changes your layout it can take a second or more to reorient and it can really interrupt your flow. Animation would alleviate that. That said, I still prefer sway over the animated alternatives for other reasons.

Sounds like a tiled window manager is not the best (at least for me).

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#226

Post by 201984 »

TylerE wrote: post #132
embedding-shape wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God yeah smartphones are the worst, Apple (& co) particularly. My iPhone 12 Mini could feel so much faster if I could just disable all the annoying animations that just make everything feel slower instead of being helpful. Setting animation speed to 0x is probably the feature from Android I miss the most.

Accessibility > Reduce Motion

It just turns the motion into fades of equal duration. Reason 352811 I will never own an iPhone.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#227

Post by silon42 »

eqvinox wrote: post #108

The application of "every frame perfect" to the mouse pointer ranges from neutral to actively harmful. It causes roughly 1 frame of delay, which can be enough to bump the display-eye-hand-mouse loop out of whack (this seems to be different from person to person). It also causes pointer stutter when the system is under load side the pointer can't be independently updated.

+1... every frame perfect is less important than lag (ie something should happen at next frame after user action).

Pointer should be async with the rest of desktop anyway, unless the system is broken.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#228

Post by Kiro »

Groxx wrote: post #185
Kiro wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which the majority of people think is a horrible experience. There's even a sibling comment in this thread pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518721

Most shoulder-surfers who see my phone ask me how everything's so fast, and get me to show them the settings. Being able to disable the extremely-excessive animations many things have nowadays is fantastic, and is a great reminder that hardware actually has made progress in the past two decades. (I use accessibility -> reduce motion, personally. less flaky than the dev options, though also less reliable)

Finally someone not roleplaying. You're the first person who acknowledges the flakiness of the dev options. People are self-reporting when they claim they set it to 0x without realizing it's unusable due to the bugs.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#229

Post by mrob »

Gigachad wrote: post #197
mrob wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are entertainment products, not tools. It's acceptable for a game UI to draw attention to itself for artistic effect, but I don't want to have to put up with this when I'm trying to get work done. Instant state transitions become imperceptible as you learn how they work. An instant UI effectively functions as part of your body, just like hand tools do. Animations make this impossible. Compare an ordinary pencil…

Everything in reality is animated. Nothing instantaneously snaps between two states. Which is why UX designers want to animate everything, it looks more natural for something to move from one place to the next rather than snap instantaneously. Everything used to be even more animated, ebook readers would play a 3D page turning animation, these days we settle for subtle abstract animations.

>Everything in reality is animated. Nothing instantaneously snaps between two states.

That's precisely why a GUI should not be animated. No matter how I operate it, the action I use already has its own animation, e.g. my finger moving on the mouse. If I add another animation in the GUI itself that's double animation. It's equivalent to pressing a button and triggering a servo to automatically press that same button.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#230

Post by mrob »

Kiro wrote: post #147
lynndotpy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can back that up, "Majority" is something you're making up. It's a guess. It also doesn't matter whether it's true if the majority or not- "Instant transitions are only good in theory" is not a true statement. Instant transitions are good in practice for many people and that has been true for decades.

Most people with that opinion keep using apps and devices with animations, but thinking it would be better without them. Very few actually torture themselves like that in practice.

Most people aren't even aware that it's possible to turn them off.
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