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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

If you’re going to use animations, there’s three reasons to do so:

1) it adds meaningful value to the ux (like that sorting example in the link)

2) it’s a micro interaction, like a heart lighting up when you like something, so it adds delight to the ux and I don’t have to wait for it to finish

3) it covers up other jank in the ux, like known slow processing or something

If you insist of animations, make them incredibly fast, otherwise we’re all going to be mad eventually.

It’s ALWAYS better to invest the time you’d have spent on animating shit to instead just make your app faster

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I dunno, by default things on the web just jump in and out abruptly. Browsers seem janky by default even when always fast.

I think just a layer of smoothness can help a lot.

I’d argue that the web is almost always janky, no matter how fast or slow.

things work great on 2000$ workstations and laptops, with low to no network latency, in a demo unburdened by the rest of garbage on the website

on a 8 year old device, with 200ms network latency, while the browser performs three hundred TLS handshakes with all the ads and tracking services... not so great

Page transitions on the web are just horrible. There is a reason that most websites these days are going for side sheets and pop up modals while apps still show real full pages.

Apps animate between making it look less janky and they also hold your position when you return while a web app will reload the whole thing including requests when you move back, losing your state and position.

That's a good summary of things to consider.

With that in mind, it seems pretty nice if a library can make simple animations much easier.

The demo shows some promising examples that tend to be common polish on, say, iOS. The simple sorting/delete ListView example is pretty nice compared to the instant changes with zero feedback it's compared to.

Meanwhile, web animations by hand can take quite a bit of thought even for basic things, like fiddling with CSS `transition` and ensuring your component lifecycle sees it through. Always ends up being a bit brittle, like having to duplicate CSS time durations with your JS components.

I'll have to play with it.

The first example on the page is actually decent I think, visually showing the two elements swapping so you see where they moved to, but making it so automatic is going to be an irresistible temptation for many people.

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