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Comment by bombela | Hacker News Reader

Yes please. Let me turn that off. It is now becoming harder and harder to turn all those time wasting animations everywhere

Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.

On iOS, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn any of them off. You can merely "reduce motion". But it still wastes up to second in the worst case.

What about gtk3 or 4. Now there is some crap animation everywhere in gtk applications and I don't know how to turn that off.

Computers are so fast. Most software is already bad enough that it manages to slow down our beautiful hardware. Let's not make it even slower with animations.

Sure have optional animations if that helps newcomers understand better the flow of your application. But make it optional please. Pretty please?

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> Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.

I recently found out about Android's animation disable feature and holy hell it made my phone feel so much more snappy and responsive to input. But as you mentioned there are too many bugs - one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated. I'm tempted to use it anyway. Hopefully in the future Android will add some sort of categorization/prioritization for animations so things can be tweaked more.

I may be in the minority here but I am kind of annoyed with how "juicing" the interface/experience seems to be kind of bleeding over into general applications from the game development scene. It does make sense for games and some apps but in general I don't need animations and tweens attached to every button on my phone.

Here's a tactic I've taken with android phones for the last 7 years and it's been a huge help.

Turn on developer options on the phone (you find the OS build info in the settings and tap it something like 8 times).

Go into the new developer menu and go to the drawing section.

Set the following 3 items to 0.5

Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, animator duration scale

The end result is that all animations provided by the OS are running at twice the speed and it feels snappy while still allowing animations to do their job at hinting information.

It's like I have a new phone. Thank you so very much for this tip.

Wow, fantastic. That's an awesome tip!

> one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated.

Pretty sure this is due to the fact that being able to disable animations is usually done as an accessibility concern - for people who are motion sensitive it could be problematic to have loading bars etc.

I agree that the categorization of animations could be helpful. Or at least being able to limit it by app.

The key thing I think is you have to keep the user in control.

I have the same rant about excessive animation in the user interface, and on reflection it is not exactly the animation that is the problem, sure, it is the exasperating factor, but the underlying problem is that you have removed the users control in favor of the animation, however, that being said, keeping the user in control requires an interruptible animation system, which requires more moving part and is harder to get right... probably for the best to just leave off the animation entirely.

My impression is that Android implements animations by reducing the animation frames but not the frame per second rate.

So if an animation is a long rotation (like a loading indicator) it turns into a high frequency strobe light (Most loading animations are replaced by a static image, but not all)

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