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Every Frame Perfect

tonsky.me

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Re: Every Frame Perfect

#261

Post by RunSet »

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.

Alternatively nothing in reality is animated and everything instantaneously snaps between states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#262

Post by latexr »

liendolucas wrote: post #244

One thing I will never understand is why do me need to have animations at all? There is zero value on them. Worse I'm inclined to believe that they introduce a nasty amount of bugs and they also need to be maintained.

Animations give you clues as to what is happening and how to undo it. A great example is the macOS “genie effect” when minimising windows. A first time user who clicked the minimise button on a window and saw it simply disappear would be lost as to where it went or how to get it back. Even as it appeared on the Dock, the lack of animation there as well could be imperceptible or the user might be unable to see what changed.

By having a clear animation which indicates where the window is being moved to, it’s obvious where the window went and thus how to recover it.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#263

Post by piskov »

throwaw12 wrote: post #30
piskov wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broken windows theory The issue with “premature optimization is bad” is that some see it as a permission to not optimize at all. Hence you eventually end up with a system where everything is bad. — Although for some of us being obsessive-compulsive weirdos this is the only way of life: an itch that keeps on physically scratching until resolved. “Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve don…

> Broken windows theory Absolutely, but on the other hand businesses operate with lots of broken windows as well, and they are fine with it. Dilemma I am having is, on one side, business needs my best judgement for today and short term, because this is how most businesses survive, on the other hand, on a personal level I feel like I am stuck making non-perfect decisions, hence I can't even think about perfect world,…

> needs my best judgement for today and short term

But this is how they also fail long-term

Russians have a saying: you can only lean (which is the same word in russian as rely on/upon, thus the physics pun angle) on something that is resisting

Meaning, it is also your job to resist enshittification for the company to succeed

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#264

Post by RunSet »

Kiro wrote: post #36
ikesau wrote: post #4

I'm sure a UI that had none of these imperfect frames would feel better, but now I really want someone to edit each of these clips to show what it would actually look like. At the same time, why does everything need motion? My understanding is that motion should be used if an action subtly changes the UI in a region that's different from where the action was triggered (e.g. toasts) I think many of these transitions a…

Play any game with good UI and you will see animations used everywhere. Instant transitions are only good in theory.

> Play any game with good UI and you will see animations used everywhere. Instant transitions are only good in theory.

Would you rather the game have the coolest load screen in the universe or no load screens at all?

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#265

Post by Kiro »

cwillu wrote: post #236
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

Perhaps you should note the replies to that sibling comment

Setting animations to 0x is famously broken on Android with the UI jumping up and down on transitions. It's a litmus test to spot people falsely claiming they have it disabled without realizing it outs them.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#267

Post by liampulles »

Most stupid animations I have seen introduced to UIs are done because they are stupidly effective at impressing business stakeholders, especially non-technical ones.

It never fails to astound me how some people will fawn over "delightful" transitions. I guess I can understand it in the sense that it is an easy thing to help communicate the perception of high quality to the broader business.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#268

Post by ValdikSS »

eviks wrote: post #257
bmacho wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? No, artists (of every animated media: 2d, 3d, stop motion, video game) intentionally put extra effort into creating ugly frames. Not based on theory, but based on taste (artists' personal taste, or measured). It's not a cost cutting method, not anymore. It actually requires extra effort, and it makes the product more expensive. Maybe in animated media it is an acquired taste/coconut effect and not a way to exploi…

> As GP has said: "It's very possible". And as the reply asked: provide at least one example > Maybe in animated media it is an acquired taste/coconut effect and not a way to exploit our visual system. So not relevant to the original theory? Also, that'd be an example of extra effort into ugly frames that originated as cost saving measures, not quality/artistic expression methods.

You can read why people prefer 24 fps movies instead of high-fps ones.

I'm quite puzzled by the article. Animations in software are transitions, it should not be perfect in UI sense, because it might look weird to the human eye in this case.

I'd prefer motion blur to something crisp. This is the case of file picker example.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#269

Post by eviks »

ValdikSS wrote: post #268
eviks wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As GP has said: "It's very possible". And as the reply asked: provide at least one example > Maybe in animated media it is an acquired taste/coconut effect and not a way to exploit our visual system. So not relevant to the original theory? Also, that'd be an example of extra effort into ugly frames that originated as cost saving measures, not quality/artistic expression methods.

You can read why people prefer 24 fps movies instead of high-fps ones. I'm quite puzzled by the article. Animations in software are transitions, it should not be perfect in UI sense, because it might look weird to the human eye in this case. I'd prefer motion blur to something crisp. This is the case of file picker example.

You can also read why those people are misguided. But instead of doing the irrelevant art analogies again, go back to the article and cite a specific principle that is violated by blur.

It has a list:

> Now, what does it mean in practice?

Also, blur doesn't even look weird statically! And again, provide at least one example where it looks weird to our eyes

> This is the case of file picker example.

You also don't seem to understand what that example shows, the "blur/crisp" is not at issue here, it's, for example, "textedit" jumping on top of "where". Now explain what non-artistic human vision benefit there is to 2 words being drawn on top of one another in a UI transition instead of the first word disappearing completely before the second moves to its place.

Re: Every Frame Perfect

#270

Post by lynndotpy »

Kiro wrote: post #265
cwillu wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should note the replies to that sibling comment

Setting animations to 0x is famously broken on Android with the UI jumping up and down on transitions. It's a litmus test to spot people falsely claiming they have it disabled without realizing it outs them.

You continue making unsubstantiated claims with loaded terms, denigrating others by accusing them of being dishonest when just stating their preferences.

It's not a litmus test, you are simply wrong in the way you dismiss other people.

Some of us like it at 0x, even when some apps are janky. Further, plenty of us here use desktop operating systems. Android is not the only way to get on the internet.

Both Windows (at least as of 10 and before) and most Linux distros allow you to disable animations too, and it works fine. Desktop operating systems ~15+ years ago lacked these animations entirely.

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