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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Yes! I am so glad somebody called out the UI animations! The one in 1Password bugs me every time, I don't use Spaces because it takes too long for the animations to play out. There are more examples.

Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations". Advanced users will love you for it!

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I have a Wells Fargo auto loan. Their site is separate from the main Wells Fargo site. They have no animations (not even spinners) and basic web forms. The site feels so fast compared to other sites it's jarring. I often feel the need to double check that what I just did actually got applied because it feels like someone is presenting a mock UI demo with static images.

It would not surprise me in the least if the 1Password unlock animation is a deliberate attempt to hide the time it takes 1Password to decrypt your password list.

Stating that they are decrypting (and it takes time) would probably change users' opinion from "this is slow" to "this is secure"

I seem to recall reading this when I investigated before. Article is shooting the messenger in a way, the animation is not the problem. Agilebits (the co who makes 1password) generally aren't the types to introduce superfluous elements.

It's not the decryption process that is slow (computers can do AES really really fast these days), it's the deliberate slowness introduced by PBKDF2, which attempts to thwart brute force attacks.

Animations are cool the first time you see them. The tenth time, they are just aggravating.

I'm confused. By Spaces animation, are we talking about the horizontal sliding transition?

On my machine (High Sierra) the transition time between Spaces is dependent on the finger gesture swipe velocity. I'm not really sure I would even call this an animation- the Spaces x-offset is being adjusted as I move my fingers along the track pad in the same way as scrolling up/down in a browser behaves. There's literally no waiting for the "animation" to complete; when I lift my fingers I'm either in one space or the other.

Agreed on the gesture, I feel that’s implemented well. But I suppose the author is talking about the animation you get when using the keyboard. I also find myself annoyed switching spaces on macOS vs. dwm, tmux, etc.

Something else: I got myself a tablet a few weeks ago and now find myself disliking the constant scrolling and wishing for (instant) pagination instead.

Compared to i3wm on Linux, it takes ages. I can could probably switch workspaces three or more times (using the keyboard) during the time that a single Spaces animation takes to complete.

Also, I am on High Sierra too, and there is at least a half-second lag between when the gesture ends and when the animation is complete. Taken together with the time it takes to initiate the gesture, I'd say we're around 0.75s.

They are keyboard-based ways to switch spaces too.

I do find that if you use the keyboard to switch spaces quickly, the animations become faster too. Unfortunately the app in the other space do not get new keyboard input during the animation.

Incidentally, I am on Xubuntu, and I would love to have the workspace switching transition that macOS has. Switching workspaces on xfce is lightning-fast but I would love to have an indication on whether I moved left or right. (other than the small indicator in a Panel) Ubuntu solves this with a HUD (or at least did with Unity).

> Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations".

You can disable every animation in OS X itself via the command line (defaults write). I put them all in a shell script that I run on new installs. You may be out of luck with 1Password.

Unfortunately, not every animation. In particular, the Spaces transition animations that the OP is complaining about is not one of the ones you can disable with `defaults.write`.

I re-check if it's been added with every new macOS release; no luck so far :(

One way to make the Spaces animation tolerable is to enable "Reduce motion" in Accessibility preferences.

https://i.imgur.com/zg4gZA7.png

This is amazing - thank you!

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