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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"He’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Here, Bathiche has solved that infuriating problem where you write or draw on a screen, and the ink is always a half-second behind your finger."

So few people get that. Alan Kay once wrote in the 1970s that it was as unacceptable for there to be a delay between user action and response on a computer as it was unacceptable on a piano. Now we have several gigaflops on every desktop and still can't get that right.

We really need this in web browsers. Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Touch a link in Firefox for Android and see what happens, or rather what doesn't happen.

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People often don't understand that for an action on the web (clicking a link) the user feedback and end result don't need to be the same thing. You can update the UI in a meaningful way while you wait for the end-result to come back from the server. A user should never have to sit there after doing an action and ask themselves "Did I really click that? Or did I miss it?"

> Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later.

Interestingly, Apple are really pushing this now. They've just demonstrated new predictive tech to get response time down to ~ 30 ms from ~ 60 ms on iOS devices (if I remember correctly, this is based on a publicly available WWDC talk).

That said, 30 ms is still far too much. Microsoft made a good demo showing just how noticeable 30 ms of lag is compared to none at all (linked on this page by sosuke). But it really just goes to show how poor this current generation of capacitive touch-based devices is. And Apple's software-based approach, though it helps, is not sufficient without new hardware too...

As an Android dev, this is what I envy of iOS.

I really wish that Android would also strongly push in that direction (and I hope that Google has some internal branches where the View system is rethought).

The design direction of the platform is astoundingly great, but the implementation lags far behind the vision.

Sit in a $100k Tesla and drag the fullscreen map view around on the giant touchscreen, watch it stutter and lag. It drives me up a fucking wall.

Yeah man, I don't own a Tesla but I hate waiting for shit too. Like when you dial 911 and they don't show up till an hour later:

https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tgvzffz3io7iw6zwczbul5...

The Apple Macintosh did this in 1984 (with the mouse cursor). Jobs understood the importance of this... If you get a chance, find an old Mac and just move its mouse around. There is absolutely zero lag. For a while it was the #1 reason why I couldn't tolerate Windows, whose cursor by comparison was flickery and laggy. (And today it's a reason why I don't like Android.)

Apple hardware and software still prioritizes this.

Glad to see Microsoft finally caught up ;)

http://lowendmac.com/2006/vintage-macs-with-system-6-run-cir...

Vintage Macs also had 0% (seemingly) cursor lag and 0% cursor flicker. Took Windows 20 years to finally have a usable (coming from a Mac at least) mouse cursor.

Unfortunately, this is true. My vintage 90's Mac that runs System 7 feels faster and more responsive when word processing than my 2012 iMac.

Context shifts.

Back in the days, people wanted tools to do serious things, expensive tools. And computers were nothing yet. Easy to dismiss. Now, computers are used for entertainment mostly, cost 400$, so who cares. Most of this industry is driven by the shiny, so it's easy to overlook lowly basic details.

Even when people care (Android Project Butter etc etc) it seems a bit too late, the culture shifted a bit and there are too many layers.

We've made a habit of punting on latency, and not just in HID.

It appears to be a hard habit to break.

Bring in some game developers. They understand latency.

Not all -- in the era of the PS2, 60FPS was common. Once the Xbox 360/PS3 generation started, 30FPS was acceptable.

Then again, that'll have to change with the advent of VR. Variable framerates can induce nausea.

This is one thing Apple really 'got right' in iOS. You can especially see it in any app that allows you to zoom or pan the view. If you change the perspective, it will always redraw the screen according to your input. Sometimes it has to fill in the new area with a temporary texture while it runs off to load the right one, but the response is instantaneous.

As an Android user, this is one of my biggest gripes. Android just hasn't figured this out, yet, or doesn't care.

Unfortunately, apple seems to have regressed with the apple watch. It really feels laggy and unresponsive at times.

I think that Android started off the wrong way with something aimed at the existing competition at that time (so the first Blackberry, WP and Nokia smartphones). Now it is very hard to revamp Android in order to accomplish this.

I just hope that the experiments made by the Dart team (they are aiming at a 120 fps lag free framework on Android) are also conducted internally in the Android team (not necessarily with Dart, but preferably not with Java).

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