People often forget that animations serve purely a supportive role and do not exist for the purpose of having animations.

They are there to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other. That's why we have them.

This knowledge eventually got lost (figuratively speaking) and now we have code that needs to wait on the animation to finish.

Another amazing example of cargo culting.

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alexdbird an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other

I'd expand on this: used well, they show the user than a state change is happening directly because of a particular action of theirs, and hint at how they might reverse or modify it.

In fact I'd disagree with masking. If something appeared instantly with no hint as to why, that is a distinct anti-pattern on a touch screen.

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antihero an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They aren’t purely for that, they also contribute to how an application feels to use in a creative manner.

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hypfer an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't want my image editor to feel like something in a creative manner though.

I want it to rotate an image by 90° when I tap the button that does that.

See, this is exactly my point when I say that animations are no end in themselves. They serve a supporting role to better get the actual job done.

The actual job is not "feel" it is "do". For vibes, there are movies, Art, and AI hallucinations.

Of course, "feel" can greatly enhance the "do", but only if it takes the back seat, which is exactly what I just said.

The age-old debate "form follows function" vs "form over function", essentially.

One of them is correct tho, because in the real non-ZIRP world, correctness is defined as "achieves a tangible goal".

Which is not to say that stuff optimizing for other goals would be "incorrect" or "worthless", but it exists in a different category from "software". More like "software-adjacent Art".

The distinction being made based on "what is the primary goal we want to achieve here"

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Also caused by ZIRP but differently, we have that problem that software trying to invoke feelings usually does so because it wants to sell you something or has any other style of goal that might not be aligned with yours.

So that adds yet another layer.

Pure utility cannot scam people into stuff they actually didn't want to do.

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hadrien01 9 minutes ago | parent [-]

I disable all animations everywhere (Android, Windows, Gnome) because I hate that they make me feel like I'm losing time waiting for something that could be instant, and they sometimes make me dizzy. I'm particularly exasperated that iOS doesn't offer that possibility.

But rotating an image is one of the rare use cases where I do want the animation. It makes me see what action happened, with which rotation angle, without having to think twice.

	▲	hypfer 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Huh, good point. True. The motion itself indeed gets picked up intuitively by the brain. Okay, I'm convinced that picture rotation should be animated to the exact degree that achieves this.