The e-mail I just sent to Tim Cook about iOS 7.1 animations.

Posted:
in iPhone edited April 2014

(shorter version sent to Apple feedback)

 

What I am uncomfortable living with regards iOS 7 are its animations.

 


(I’m running iOS 7.1 on my iPhone 5, but I have also used a 5s to test the following)


 


My three issues with animations on iOS 7.1 are as follows:


 


1. They are too slow. The animations were nice and fast on 6.0.3, but were then slow on 7.0, and though sped up on  7.1, they are not yet able to be called fast enough. And when hitting the home screen the icons take far too long to settle into their final position.


 


2. When unlocking on all previous major releases of iOS since iPhone OS 1.1.2 as the icons “flew in” you had the ability to paginate home screens even before the unlocking springboard animation finished. But now, not only do the icons take far too long to long to settle into their final position, but you cannot paginate until they do so. We iPhone users took this feature for granted until it was ripped from us in iOS 7. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BRING THIS BACK. Interesting animations, but these devices have to use used too. I encounter this problem around 100 times daily.


 


3. What Steve Jobs referred to as “rubber-banding” when an app's interface bounces back against its vertical scrolling limit was clearly a genius feature in iPhone OS 1.0, but the new animation that was added to Messages in iOS 7, or what I’m gonna refer to as “the drunken-bounce” is hideous in use. It’s like the app is running away from you. It’s a horrid, uncomfortable experience. It’s as if scrolling in Messages is no longer tracking your finger and makes using Messages ‘sloppy’, inefficient and gives one an uneasy feeling. Also, added to this is when I’m using Messages on iPhone in a conversation with the keyboard active, if I barely push the keyboard down to hide it the bottom message in this list, thanks to this annoying drunken-bounce animation, flicks under the fold. Who thought that was a good idea? We can now safely call this drunken-bounce animation a failed experiment. I’m sure it was added to Message to make the software feel more “alive” under your fingers or something, but it doesn’t work. Get rid of it.


 


Just FYI, and because I use your products everyday.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member

    Chime in, lovers.

  • Reply 2 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    ireland wrote: »
    They are too slow. The animations were nice and fast on 6.0.3, but were then slow on 7.0, and though sped up on  7.1, they are not yet able to be called fast enough. And when hitting the home screen the icons take far too long to settle into their final position.

    After unlocking, when the icons animate into view, it could be faster but they have to time it to look good so they'd just have to allow you to turn it off. Zooming in and out of apps is now done by zooming into the app icon and out - it used to burst out from the center of the screen. I can see where they were going with that but they could also have done an animation like on OS X where the app panel zooms out of the icon into a layer of its own. This can start as fully transparent and then become fully opaque and likewise in reverse. That way the grid is already settled before the app disappears.

    There's a "reduce motion" setting that cuts some of the animations out, that might help speed up some parts:


    [VIDEO]

    ireland wrote: »
    I encounter this problem around 100 times daily.

    Ah, the old 'exaggerate minor details to make the complaint more important' routine. You could also have gone the route of calculating the milliseconds lost multiplied by the number of days and number of users and their average salaries to get a figure of how much money they are costing their customers in lost time from UI animations.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post



    Ah, the old 'exaggerate minor details to make the complaint more important' routine.

     

    Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. This affects the experience. It's crucial. These are the details that separate an Android from an iOS. If Tim and Ive are not concerned with this stuff, but I am, then God have mercy. Steve wouldn't have stood for this. And in fact he didn't. Steve rang Google’s senior vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra on a Sunday to complain that the yellow in the Google logo on the mobile site on iPhone wasn't the correct shade of yellow. And Steve was there when iOS could paginate before the unlocking springboard animation finished. Right now I can slide to unlock and subsequently swipe three times across the screen to get to home screen 2 before I get taken there. And this is on 7.1, 6 months after 7.0 has shipped!! It's all about these details. If they're not important to you, Marvin, then I'm concerned for your view of this company.

     

    This stuff matters. This stuff matters. This stuff matters. This stuff matters.

     

    Quote:

     There's a "reduce motion" setting that cuts some of the animations out, that might help speed up some parts.


     

    Accessibility to make it work right? Feck off. And even at that that doesn't fix either issue I was referring to. The slowness of the animations is the least important of the issues, and we like some animation. My phone isn't meant to be a dissolving slideshow. If you're going to try to defend this stuff I think you're wasting your own time.

     

    And I wouldn't mind, but, even with reduce motion on I can STILL swipe three times after unlock before I get taken to home screen 2. If I swipe fast I can get 4 to 5 swipes in before that action works. It's terrible.

  • Reply 4 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    ireland wrote: »
    Steve wouldn't have stood for this.

    People always make this assumption that their preference would be the same as Steve's. Steve Jobs was around when they timed all the sheet rollouts (the slide down panels when you hit save as or print) in OS X and app zooming and they are slow too. They even added a feature where if you hold shift when you hit the minimize button, it goes in slow motion. The UI animators clearly like you to see their work.

    I actually speedup rollouts and turn off zoom animations using OS tweaks so I can appreciate how some of these things can affect productivity but I think the importance of these iOS complaints is exaggerated.
    ireland wrote: »
    The slowness of the animations is the least important of the issues. If I swipe fast I can get 4 to 5 swipes in before that action works.

    The unlock animation zooms icons from off the sides of the screen. If they allowed you to paginate before the icons settled, the home screen icons would overlap other icons. The fact they disabled pagination shows they were paying attention to that detail. This isn't all that different in iOS 6 btw as the icons also zoom in from the sides - they just don't do any depth change. I can do 5 very fast swipes before paginating is allowed in iOS 6 too - it similarly waits until the icons settle. Given that there's a jailbreak tweak to speed it up in iOS 7, I guess the iOS 7 animations must be slower:


    [VIDEO]


    It looks a bit odd when they go that fast. The only options for Apple are to speed it up or replace it with a different animation. Maybe having a selection of animation types wouldn't be such a bad thing like they do in OS X (genie effect, scale for minimize).

    Instead of having people rely on accessibility for the zoom, just have a preference for the animation option. They can even put all the old animations back as an option.

    They changed a few things going from iOS 7 to 7.1 including the bounce animation:


    [VIDEO]


    Some of the bounces now do more of a boi-oi-oi-oing instead of boing. Maybe that's what you are referring to as a drunken bounce. The former is what would happen in real life as the recoil would cause further bounces but in a UI, a single bounce is better IMO. Messages scrolling doesn't look too bad though:


    [VIDEO]
  • Reply 5 of 7
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Quote:

     People always make this assumption that their preference would be the same as Steve's


     

    But I'm not assuming anything. Steve was not just particular, he was alive when iOS had this feature. Gruber even argues that iOS 7 wouldn't have shipped under Steve's watch and I agree with him.

     

    Quote:

     The unlock animation zooms icons from off the sides of the screen. If they allowed you to paginate before the icons settled, the home screen icons would overlap other icons.


     

    Do I have to record a video to show you how it worked on iOS 6.

     

    HERE...

     

    image

  • Reply 6 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    ireland wrote: »
    But I'm not assuming anything. Steve was not just particular, he was alive when iOS had this feature.

    The assumption is that he would have overridden a design you don't like. There's no way you could know that.
    ireland wrote: »
    Gruber even argues that iOS 7 wouldn't have shipped under Steve's watch and I agree with him.

    He doesn't know any more about what Steve would have done under these circumstances than anyone else. This particular set of circumstances would likely never have existed if Steve was still there because Forstall would still be there and there wouldn't be a reworked UI at all. This only happened after Forstall was booted out.
    ireland wrote: »
    Do I have to record a video to show you how it worked on iOS 6.

    I have iOS 6 and it doesn't let me paginate before it's done animating but that must be a performance thing. Given that they don't crop the viewport, they have the ability to paginate before the icons settle but the other thing with iOS 7 is the icon scale. Either the icons aren't shown offscreen or they are huge.

    Look here at 9 seconds in:


    [VIDEO]


    The clock and maps icons take up about 25% of the screen when they start in the frame and at 10 seconds, they scale to 15%, then 10%. It's a decelerating animation. So offscreen, they'd have to be scaled exponentially larger to maintain the same animation curve e.g 50% of the screen, which would look crazy. They could however allow you to start paginating when every icon is no larger than 15% of the screen, which seems to be around halfway in and that would make it feel more responsive.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post



    They could however allow you to start paginating when every icon is no larger than 15% of the screen, which seems to be around halfway in and that would make it feel more responsive.

     

    They should.

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