08:35 am, 23 Apr 08
your animation is too slow
Animation in software has a real use: by showing intermediate states between two end states you let the user instinctually see how they're related. But as soon as your animation takes more than around 100ms it's gratuitous. Movement should be so fast I don't notice unless I'm looking at it, because otherwise it's happening so slow I'm waiting for it. Unfortunately, the difficulty of implementing animation tends to make programmers too proud of it (I personally have fallen for this) and you end up with these terrible 500ms fades so common in Flash or Javascript-heavy apps.
Here's a personal request from me to you: knock that shit off. It looks amateurish.
Here's a personal request from me to you: knock that shit off. It looks amateurish.
Yeah – animation is nice, but it should be swift enough to almost be absent. It’s the reason I turn smooth scrolling off in most cases: in most apps, “smooth” really means “slow.” (I think an iPhone touch was where I first saw smooth scrolling done right. Apple gets this.)
Sometimes, though, it’s a balancing act. In the web app I work on for $job, it took quite a bit of tweaking to make the “your data was saved” box fade quickly enough that it wouldn’t obtrude, and yet slow enough that you’d have a chance to register it on subsequent sightings, and could still read it the first (and maybe second) time you saw it. After some experimentation, I ended up with a 1600ms fade after an 800ms timeout. It’s gone so quickly it’s easy to miss unless you were paying attention, and it’s just barely possible to consciously read it in that time, but since it’ll only be read once and thereafter only need stay around long enough to be noticed at all, I think it’s just about right. (Did you mean 5000ms fades, btw? 500ms is really short.) I’d make it even shorter, but I think then it would be missed more often that it would be seen.
I say all this, but honestly I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on it until Evan said it so clearly.
Anything that waits 5 seconds to change feels to me like it's effectively unpredictable. But I'm impatient.
Hey, good idea. I had totally forgotten about that.
Couldn't agree more, but sometimes it's not the programmer's fault
Problem is, the customers / stakeholders tend to *also* be really proud of the animation, and it can be a really hard sell to convince them to let you speed it up. Anyway, couldn't agree more.It's so frustrating when people are equivocal about this sort of thing. I know, we can add an option, so you can change the number of milliseconds if you want... Some things are just wrong. Taste matters.
Maybe you have heard that Gmail's CAPTCHA was recently defeated to the extent that some of the blackholing lists have caused domains that use them to reject Gmail emails as follows:
I would like to ask that you post four requests:
1. Go back to invite-only Gmail sign ups while susceptible to this attack;
2. Warn twice and on the third time cancel inviter's accounts when their invitees spam;
3. Convert to and support ReCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/) which is substantially harder, can't be cached, and The Right Thing in general; and
4. Give Blogger the same ReCAPTCHA -- it has terrible captcha, and a lot of spam to show for it. I was offered the same captcha by Blogger in the space of a week recently.
Thank you for anything you can do about any of these problems. This message is in as good faith as it gets.
P.S. Maybe YouTube should have ReCAPTCHA as a general intelligence-screen for comments, too.