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UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

kentnguyen.com

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Re: UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

#5

Post by dristic »

I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.

Re: UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

#6

Post by dguaraglia »

fudged wrote: post #2

I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...

I still have to find a situation (outside of gaming, where I suppose it's key to the experience) where this 'lag' bothered me at all. In fact, I've been using a Mac for almost a year now and wasn't it for that article, I would have never even noticed there was a lag.

Re: UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

#8

Post by daed »

fudged wrote: post #2

I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...

To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair. Noticeably slower than windows.

Re: UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

#9

Post by fudged »

dguaraglia wrote: post #6
fudged wrote: post #2

I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that." http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...

I still have to find a situation (outside of gaming, where I suppose it's key to the experience) where this 'lag' bothered me at all. In fact, I've been using a Mac for almost a year now and wasn't it for that article, I would have never even noticed there was a lag.

Gamers are probably the most affected by this. Similarly, music apps on Android are affected by the audio lag problems.

Re: UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android

#10

Post by ben_straub »

dristic wrote: post #5

I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.

OSX has definite advantages here.

1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against.

2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling.

3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.

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