pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote
These two are from BeOS and I see no reason to remove them. They are not just
eyecandy, they are meant to show the app is busy doing something that takes a
bit of time, but it is not completely
frozen.
On other OSes you would notice an app is frozen because its window start
glitching and not redrawing, but on BeOS/Haiku that doesn't happen if the
window thread is still alive (as it should be
for properly designed apps). So a little feedback is needed.
For WebPositive the intent is also to show some feedback. Since the code is
very fast, if you enter a wrong password, the window will close and
immediately reopen. It will look like nothing has
happened. So we need a way to tell the user "yes, I got the message that you
entered a password, but it was the wrong password".
I think since this code was written, we have added the MarkAsInvalid() call
to BTextControl, which would allow to give this feedback without an
animation. I don't know, would it be as efficient?
Anyway, so that's my stance on animations: use them where they convey someprobably frozen."
meaning, not just to look "cool".
The HIG mentions animations in two places;
"As with any kind of movement in the display, use animation sparingly so that
it is not distracting."
"Good software keep the lines of communication open. Good feedback just means
making sure that the user knows what your program is doing at any given time,
especially if the program is busy doing
something which makes them wait. Web browsers animate a little icon while
they download a web page. Users have a natural tendency to think that if
nothing seems to be happening, then the program is
So that isn't as specific, but I think it goes in the same direction.
If the intended amount of animations is none to very few it may make sense
to set the "prefers low motion" flag for webkit by default,
this is equivalent to enabeling "low motion" accesibillity settings on
MacOS, iOS. For example the Apple site will stop doing this giant animated
slideshow and be a normal scrollable site
instead.
What are your thougts?
It looks like it is not what was meant by the people writing the
specification (the values are "no preference" and "reduce", so if we make
this opt-out instead of opt-in, we are not really
following the idea).
We should at least have an option for it in WebPositive settings. I don't
know if we can switch the default and how much it will confuse users if we
reduce animations by default.
