22 ms·

How the iPad's New Trackpad Works

85 points by wallflower 7y ago

speedgoose 7y ago
> It’s unlike any mouse cursor you’ve used before. Ok sounds cool. > The pointer will only appear when you need it. Like a windows pc with a touch screen or any Android device. > The pointer is a little circular dot. Why not, it doesn't seem very precise but it's probably because UIs on iOs are not and shouldn't designed to be used with a precise pointer. > It can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. As they say, nothing new there. > It supports some navigation gestures. Like on a 20 years old Mac indeed. I'm a bit disappointed.
- Epskampie 7y ago
  > It can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. It’s because ios apps don’t have hover effects, so they use this to indicate you can click something. > Like on a 20 years old Mac indeed. Yeah, only this time around Apple will have you firmly locked in to their walled garden. What’s not to like!
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    Yes I love having to pay Apple to distribute my apps with a manual review at every update, to get them reject updates for reasons such as "you mentioned Android" or "we need an user account to test your app to check whether you write Android anywhere". I do understand why companies such as Uber had different behaviours in their app if the user was inside or close to an Apple building.
- threeseed 7y ago
  > I'm a bit disappointed. Sure. Because you didn't actually get the point. The cursor actually transforms into the touch area. No OS today does this and it's definitely novel.
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    Got it, after a second read.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Do you usually use a trackpad/mouse without looking at what you are pointing at?
  - underwater 7y ago
    I wonder what happens when I move my cursor over a large tappable area. The OS must have to maintain internal state that represents the real x, y position. Otherwise the cursor wouldn't move across the screen in a consistent way. But while moving across the tap target I don't get any visual feedback about where my cursor actually is? I'm curious to see how they solve this.
    - TheCoreh 7y ago
      They're using a subtle perspective/highlight effect similar to tvOS. It's kinda interesting, wanted to try it in person to see how effective it is at conveying the underlying position.
      - jclardy 7y ago
        I’m using it right now - it feels quite natural, and you can turn off the “snapping” effect if you want - the control will still highlight underneath, but you also still see the cursor. With the effect on the cursor “snaps” to button targets, and when it does the effect has a pulling effect, so if you apply a little motion it will move out of the control, but you see the effect visually. It serves the purpose of knowing that you can click on something, plus also makes clicking things faster because of the snapping to targets. It’s kind of like auto-aim but for your trackpad.
      - aikinai 7y ago
        I tried the beta and thought it was neat for the first 30 seconds and super annoying for the next ten minutes. I haven’t tried to do anything serious with it yet. It definitely makes it feel choppy when trying to move around the screen and do things quickly. It does store the underlying position and accelerates to catch up when you pull out of a touch target, but it still chops up the movement visually.
- rienbdj 7y ago
  you missed the most important point. the cursor changes sensitivity based on the context. navigating through buttons? it enables a snap mode for faster navigation. selecting text? it enables a slow precision mode to get exactly the right characters. I think it's pretty cool.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Precision was never the problem with iOS cursors. Stubbornly refusing to scroll/select a character at a time was the problem.
esotericsean 7y ago
I own just about one of every single Apple products, I'm completely invested in the ecosystem. Except for one thing, the iPad. I've never once had the need for one or even the want for one. I use my MacBook Pro or my iPhone, not sure why I need a bigger iPhone, so to speak. But this... this might convince me to actually get my first iPad.
- izacus 7y ago
  > But this... this might convince me to actually get my first iPad. Any you'll get a MacBook Air where you're not allowed to run a significant part of productivity/development software and absolutely nothing that wasn't approved by some californian.
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    This would be funny and fresh contrarianism if you didn’t miss that they already “own every Apple device there is”.
    - izacus 7y ago
      Does that magically allow you to deploy software to your iPad without asking Apple for their permission? Losing your ability to ever build a product that might compete with your hardware manufacturer is a massive loss of freedom no matter how much you're trying to call me a "contrarian". Remember, in Apple's world, software like Firefox which fights for privacy against corporations is not allowed to exist. That's the major difference between the iPad world and macOS world.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Well seeing that in every category that Apple sells something or installs a default app, there is a third party app that competes with it, your statement is probably false.
- pram 7y ago
  I'm pretty much the same, and it's not worth it. UNLESS you're planning on drawing, then the 12.9 is one of the best tablets you can get.
simonh 7y ago
I'm going to have to try one of these keyboards in an Apple Store, when they can open again. It just doesn't seem possible the folding mechanism and attach/detach system work that well. This and the new Airs just seem too good to be true. I'm not saying I'm a doubter, as such. Clearly apple have dropped some very important balls in the last few years, but wow. This stuff looks good.
- 0x202020 7y ago
  It seems to me that cooling is the ball that has been dropped on the new MBA. I haven’t seen one opened up yet but the heatsink design from last time (2018/2019) didn’t use a heat pipe over the CPU, it just kinda forced air to be drawn over it. From this video: https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA we can see it quickly gets to 100c and stays there despite ramping the fan up. So while a quad core that can turbo up to 3.5/3.8ghz sounds awesome, for heavy sustained performance it looks like it’s definitely going to be clocking down to 1.5ghz or so. This isn’t a surprise to me but I think some people just see 3.5/3.8 quad core and think this is going to be right on the heels of the MBP 13
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. That said compared to other notebooks, MacBooks in similar tiers tend to benchmark quite well regardless of the thermal throttling.
    - unvs 7y ago
      I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.
      - mvid 7y ago
        It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor
macspoofing 7y ago
... or just do a regular mouse cursor. Also, trackpads aren't great. If you need precision a proper mouse (+keyboard) is hard to beat.
- oakesm9 7y ago
  It supports both of those via bluetooth
kbumsik 7y ago
> ...but it can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. I tried this and it feels great! But I am wondering if this will work well with a non-native GUI stack such as Flutter or QML.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  This is the reason why cross-platform UI toolkits are just never going to be a good idea. They will always provide a worse experience than just using and designing for the native UI toolkit.
anjc 7y ago
Could Apple go back to being forward looking with their tablet/laptop/computer line please? If this keyboard/trackpad is a good idea now, then it would have been a good idea 10 years ago. If it was a good idea 10 years ago then they simply lacked the foresight to push it. It has also been a point of critique for as long, and I'm sure that I am not the only person who had to stop pretending that iPads were usable for (my) work and switched to PC for portable productivity (Surface Pro). At this rate I wont be surprised to see revolutionary full access to the filesystem, and flexible window management, in 2030.
shp0ngle 7y ago
This brings memories for me, as I used to own an Eee Transformer, which was a 2011 Android tablet with Honeycomb, and keyboard and trackpad... It was surprisingly useful, but... it was still 2011 Android. The best thing was still to put an SSH client on it and actually do all the work somewhere else remotely.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
  Ah, those were the days.
- josteink 7y ago
  Had one of those devices. Kept it alive for several years by maintaining a custom Cyanogenmod fork for it. It was a great device, save for the severely compromised Nvidia-SOC which made HD-playback only work sometimes. Such a let-down! Had someone made a device like this with the specs of the Nexus 7, I would have bought it and replaced my Transformer in a heartbeat. But nobody did, so now I’m back on my Thinkpad, and it’s actually really nice to run a OS of your choice, which you loaded on a machine you own, which isn’t actively fighting you.
  - shp0ngle 7y ago
    I looked it up and it seems the Transformer line is still alive, they just put Windows 10 on it
BubRoss 7y ago
It seems like this is not actually about the trackpad but about the software of of how it is handled. I thought there was new hardware, but it seems like it is making better use of the multi touch trackpads that have been on their laptops for a long time.
musicale 7y ago
This kind of reminds me of how controller-based GUIs work in some console games. Basically you move focus around with the directional buttons or the analog stick.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Or the BlackBerry, which brought out an actual cursor on webpages but only moved the focus everywhere else. That little thumb track-pad completely changes the experience of using a phone, and I'm super bummed that the only modern smartphone that had it (the 2014 BlackBerry Classic) never caught on.
sys_64738 7y ago
Wow. This looks really cooler than I imagined. I assumed that it would be a simple mouse cursor but this feels more like a full screen Mac laptop experience. Craig clearly is the successor to Scott.
rock_artist 7y ago
You can feel the new workflow if you have developer account or enroll to Apple beta. Tried it on my 10.2" 2019 iPad. The good: This really makes more complex productivity possible on the iPad getting it closer to a desktop machine. The bad: I've already saw bugs which are new to 13.4 (didn't have them on 13.3.1). It still requires developers to use newer API to support trackpad. For example, Firefox now has no right click support while Safari includes of course.
chadlavi 7y ago
The cursor isn't always present, just when you need it... How does this work with a physical mouse? Does the cursor reappear in the same spot on the screen, or what? Would someone using a physical mouse constantly be forced to reposition it?
- developer2 7y ago
  It remembers where you left the cursor. It's still a normal cursor, they just make it invisible when not in active use.
  - chadlavi 7y ago
    Thanks!
mkchoi212 7y ago
Pretty cool! The feeling I keep getting is that Apple is slowly “ruining” a good design. What was familiar, easy to use, and required no explanation, is trying to become something it isn’t; a laptop. IPadOS still has a long ways to go to but if Apple decides to keep going down this path - which I feel like they will - cursor support seems like a right step towards achieving that goal.
- cjohansson 7y ago
  iOS and macOS lost the good design years ago, nowadays you need to find an expert to learn how to do certain actions, there is no manual and a lot of actions are completely unintuitive. My family uses latest iPadOS an no one knows how to split screen, we learned it twice but it’s so hard you forget about it
  - jungturk 7y ago
    I agree that its difficult to discover most features beyond the basics, though Apple does provide a digital user guide and the on-board Tips app to help you acquaint. Those two resources are themselves not that easy to discover, however. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados (hit table of contents -> basics)
mkchoi212 7y ago
Also, no one seems to be focusing on the fact that the iPad is floating with this new case? Are there any links/videos that describes how the mechanism works?? Super curious to see how rigid/flexible/stable the mechanism is.
- gumby 7y ago
  I had that thought too but apart from the Ti Powerbook my laptop hinges have survived for years. In fact around the house there's only one with a hinge that feels noticeably looser and it's about 10 years old. The hinge on the keyboard appears to be about the same size. So maybe it's OK. Also I assume the iPad itself is coupled magnetically to the case/stand.
  - mkchoi212 7y ago
    Yeah the reliability of these hinges is something that is still open for questions... Would hate to see a keyboard case costing about $300 to fail after a year or so :(
systemvoltage 7y ago
iPad OS (and iOS) has 1 major flaw and no one seems to be talking about it: - The animations/effects etc take way too long. It is fatiguing to work on it because every action takes at least 2+ seconds with a dozen animations, each one lasting 100ms-300ms! Try the following task yourself: Copy a piece of text from safari and create a new note in the Notes app, and paste it in there. While you're doing this, time it. Seriously, do it. And then do it 10 times. See how tired you get. We need a completely new operating system with absolutely zero animations. You know what happens when you launch vim from CLI? It starts up. No animations. CLI is a pain to work with at times, but this aspect is so critical to putting a smile on the users face. Everything would instantly become insanely fast. I understand the value of animations - they're there to provide context, where something slides in and slides out from. This is fine for iPhone. But not for a workstation. I also understand that I can disable motion in accessibility settings but it still doesn't disable all of them. Also, that's not the default so that's a moot point. This is such a low hanging fruit to speed up things, but alas, we have UX/UI designers that insist on "sleek" and "sexy" UX/UI without delving into the fundamentals of what makes a product or software pleasant to use. While you're at it, you'd also improve the UX - battery life because you're not churning transparency effects and motion blur through the GPU pipes. Yes, battery life is "UX" IMO.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- taspeotis 7y ago
  There is a “Reduce Motion” setting in iOS that speeds some things up a little bit.
  - systemvoltage 7y ago
    I knew this would come up, thus I already addressed it in my comment above. That's not the default. And it still doesn't feel good - because animations are at the core of the UX/UI of Apple software. IMO the software needs to be designed from ground up with strict understanding of productivity and less marketing/design/aesthetics/animation. "Reduce motion" seems like an after thought hidden deep in the accessibility settings.
darkerside 7y ago
I anticipate hating this. I don't see how a morphing cursor can ever be learned in a way that is efficient over the long term. Still, we've stagnated for too long in our touchscreen UI design. I'm glad to see Apple trying something new.
Grustaf 7y ago
This article is very confusing, the video is clearly an ad by Apple, but it only seems to appear in this article, and the article itself is not marked as an ad. What is actually going on?

85 points by wallflower 7y ago

> It’s unlike any mouse cursor you’ve used before. Ok sounds cool. > The pointer will only appear when you need it. Like a windows pc with a touch screen or any Android device. > The pointer is a little circular dot. Why not, it doesn't seem very precise but it's probably because UIs on iOs are not and shouldn't designed to be used with a precise pointer. > It can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. As they say, nothing new there. > It supports some navigation gestures. Like on a 20 years old Mac indeed. I'm a bit disappointed.

Epskampie 7y ago
> It can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. It’s because ios apps don’t have hover effects, so they use this to indicate you can click something. > Like on a 20 years old Mac indeed. Yeah, only this time around Apple will have you firmly locked in to their walled garden. What’s not to like!
- speedgoose 7y ago
  Yes I love having to pay Apple to distribute my apps with a manual review at every update, to get them reject updates for reasons such as "you mentioned Android" or "we need an user account to test your app to check whether you write Android anywhere". I do understand why companies such as Uber had different behaviours in their app if the user was inside or close to an Apple building.
threeseed 7y ago
> I'm a bit disappointed. Sure. Because you didn't actually get the point. The cursor actually transforms into the touch area. No OS today does this and it's definitely novel.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  Got it, after a second read.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Do you usually use a trackpad/mouse without looking at what you are pointing at?
- underwater 7y ago
  I wonder what happens when I move my cursor over a large tappable area. The OS must have to maintain internal state that represents the real x, y position. Otherwise the cursor wouldn't move across the screen in a consistent way. But while moving across the tap target I don't get any visual feedback about where my cursor actually is? I'm curious to see how they solve this.
  - TheCoreh 7y ago
    They're using a subtle perspective/highlight effect similar to tvOS. It's kinda interesting, wanted to try it in person to see how effective it is at conveying the underlying position.
    - jclardy 7y ago
      I’m using it right now - it feels quite natural, and you can turn off the “snapping” effect if you want - the control will still highlight underneath, but you also still see the cursor. With the effect on the cursor “snaps” to button targets, and when it does the effect has a pulling effect, so if you apply a little motion it will move out of the control, but you see the effect visually. It serves the purpose of knowing that you can click on something, plus also makes clicking things faster because of the snapping to targets. It’s kind of like auto-aim but for your trackpad.
    - aikinai 7y ago
      I tried the beta and thought it was neat for the first 30 seconds and super annoying for the next ten minutes. I haven’t tried to do anything serious with it yet. It definitely makes it feel choppy when trying to move around the screen and do things quickly. It does store the underlying position and accelerates to catch up when you pull out of a touch target, but it still chops up the movement visually.
rienbdj 7y ago
you missed the most important point. the cursor changes sensitivity based on the context. navigating through buttons? it enables a snap mode for faster navigation. selecting text? it enables a slow precision mode to get exactly the right characters. I think it's pretty cool.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Precision was never the problem with iOS cursors. Stubbornly refusing to scroll/select a character at a time was the problem.

esotericsean 7y ago

I own just about one of every single Apple products, I'm completely invested in the ecosystem. Except for one thing, the iPad. I've never once had the need for one or even the want for one. I use my MacBook Pro or my iPhone, not sure why I need a bigger iPhone, so to speak. But this... this might convince me to actually get my first iPad.

izacus 7y ago
> But this... this might convince me to actually get my first iPad. Any you'll get a MacBook Air where you're not allowed to run a significant part of productivity/development software and absolutely nothing that wasn't approved by some californian.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  This would be funny and fresh contrarianism if you didn’t miss that they already “own every Apple device there is”.
  - izacus 7y ago
    Does that magically allow you to deploy software to your iPad without asking Apple for their permission? Losing your ability to ever build a product that might compete with your hardware manufacturer is a massive loss of freedom no matter how much you're trying to call me a "contrarian". Remember, in Apple's world, software like Firefox which fights for privacy against corporations is not allowed to exist. That's the major difference between the iPad world and macOS world.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Well seeing that in every category that Apple sells something or installs a default app, there is a third party app that competes with it, your statement is probably false.
pram 7y ago
I'm pretty much the same, and it's not worth it. UNLESS you're planning on drawing, then the 12.9 is one of the best tablets you can get.

simonh 7y ago

I'm going to have to try one of these keyboards in an Apple Store, when they can open again. It just doesn't seem possible the folding mechanism and attach/detach system work that well. This and the new Airs just seem too good to be true. I'm not saying I'm a doubter, as such. Clearly apple have dropped some very important balls in the last few years, but wow. This stuff looks good.

0x202020 7y ago
It seems to me that cooling is the ball that has been dropped on the new MBA. I haven’t seen one opened up yet but the heatsink design from last time (2018/2019) didn’t use a heat pipe over the CPU, it just kinda forced air to be drawn over it. From this video: https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA we can see it quickly gets to 100c and stays there despite ramping the fan up. So while a quad core that can turbo up to 3.5/3.8ghz sounds awesome, for heavy sustained performance it looks like it’s definitely going to be clocking down to 1.5ghz or so. This isn’t a surprise to me but I think some people just see 3.5/3.8 quad core and think this is going to be right on the heels of the MBP 13
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design. That said compared to other notebooks, MacBooks in similar tiers tend to benchmark quite well regardless of the thermal throttling.
  - unvs 7y ago
    I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.
    - mvid 7y ago
      It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor

macspoofing 7y ago

... or just do a regular mouse cursor. Also, trackpads aren't great. If you need precision a proper mouse (+keyboard) is hard to beat.

oakesm9 7y ago
It supports both of those via bluetooth

kbumsik 7y ago

> ...but it can change shape based on what it’s pointing at. I tried this and it feels great! But I am wondering if this will work well with a non-native GUI stack such as Flutter or QML.

DagAgren 7y ago
This is the reason why cross-platform UI toolkits are just never going to be a good idea. They will always provide a worse experience than just using and designing for the native UI toolkit.

anjc 7y ago

Could Apple go back to being forward looking with their tablet/laptop/computer line please? If this keyboard/trackpad is a good idea now, then it would have been a good idea 10 years ago. If it was a good idea 10 years ago then they simply lacked the foresight to push it. It has also been a point of critique for as long, and I'm sure that I am not the only person who had to stop pretending that iPads were usable for (my) work and switched to PC for portable productivity (Surface Pro). At this rate I wont be surprised to see revolutionary full access to the filesystem, and flexible window management, in 2030.

shp0ngle 7y ago

This brings memories for me, as I used to own an Eee Transformer, which was a 2011 Android tablet with Honeycomb, and keyboard and trackpad... It was surprisingly useful, but... it was still 2011 Android. The best thing was still to put an SSH client on it and actually do all the work somewhere else remotely.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
Ah, those were the days.
josteink 7y ago
Had one of those devices. Kept it alive for several years by maintaining a custom Cyanogenmod fork for it. It was a great device, save for the severely compromised Nvidia-SOC which made HD-playback only work sometimes. Such a let-down! Had someone made a device like this with the specs of the Nexus 7, I would have bought it and replaced my Transformer in a heartbeat. But nobody did, so now I’m back on my Thinkpad, and it’s actually really nice to run a OS of your choice, which you loaded on a machine you own, which isn’t actively fighting you.
- shp0ngle 7y ago
  I looked it up and it seems the Transformer line is still alive, they just put Windows 10 on it

BubRoss 7y ago

It seems like this is not actually about the trackpad but about the software of of how it is handled. I thought there was new hardware, but it seems like it is making better use of the multi touch trackpads that have been on their laptops for a long time.

musicale 7y ago

This kind of reminds me of how controller-based GUIs work in some console games. Basically you move focus around with the directional buttons or the analog stick.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
Or the BlackBerry, which brought out an actual cursor on webpages but only moved the focus everywhere else. That little thumb track-pad completely changes the experience of using a phone, and I'm super bummed that the only modern smartphone that had it (the 2014 BlackBerry Classic) never caught on.

sys_64738 7y ago

Wow. This looks really cooler than I imagined. I assumed that it would be a simple mouse cursor but this feels more like a full screen Mac laptop experience. Craig clearly is the successor to Scott.

rock_artist 7y ago

You can feel the new workflow if you have developer account or enroll to Apple beta. Tried it on my 10.2" 2019 iPad. The good: This really makes more complex productivity possible on the iPad getting it closer to a desktop machine. The bad: I've already saw bugs which are new to 13.4 (didn't have them on 13.3.1). It still requires developers to use newer API to support trackpad. For example, Firefox now has no right click support while Safari includes of course.

chadlavi 7y ago

The cursor isn't always present, just when you need it... How does this work with a physical mouse? Does the cursor reappear in the same spot on the screen, or what? Would someone using a physical mouse constantly be forced to reposition it?

developer2 7y ago
It remembers where you left the cursor. It's still a normal cursor, they just make it invisible when not in active use.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  Thanks!

mkchoi212 7y ago

Pretty cool! The feeling I keep getting is that Apple is slowly “ruining” a good design. What was familiar, easy to use, and required no explanation, is trying to become something it isn’t; a laptop. IPadOS still has a long ways to go to but if Apple decides to keep going down this path - which I feel like they will - cursor support seems like a right step towards achieving that goal.

cjohansson 7y ago
iOS and macOS lost the good design years ago, nowadays you need to find an expert to learn how to do certain actions, there is no manual and a lot of actions are completely unintuitive. My family uses latest iPadOS an no one knows how to split screen, we learned it twice but it’s so hard you forget about it
- jungturk 7y ago
  I agree that its difficult to discover most features beyond the basics, though Apple does provide a digital user guide and the on-board Tips app to help you acquaint. Those two resources are themselves not that easy to discover, however. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados (hit table of contents -> basics)

mkchoi212 7y ago

Also, no one seems to be focusing on the fact that the iPad is floating with this new case? Are there any links/videos that describes how the mechanism works?? Super curious to see how rigid/flexible/stable the mechanism is.

gumby 7y ago
I had that thought too but apart from the Ti Powerbook my laptop hinges have survived for years. In fact around the house there's only one with a hinge that feels noticeably looser and it's about 10 years old. The hinge on the keyboard appears to be about the same size. So maybe it's OK. Also I assume the iPad itself is coupled magnetically to the case/stand.
- mkchoi212 7y ago
  Yeah the reliability of these hinges is something that is still open for questions... Would hate to see a keyboard case costing about $300 to fail after a year or so :(

systemvoltage 7y ago

iPad OS (and iOS) has 1 major flaw and no one seems to be talking about it: - The animations/effects etc take way too long. It is fatiguing to work on it because every action takes at least 2+ seconds with a dozen animations, each one lasting 100ms-300ms! Try the following task yourself: Copy a piece of text from safari and create a new note in the Notes app, and paste it in there. While you're doing this, time it. Seriously, do it. And then do it 10 times. See how tired you get. We need a completely new operating system with absolutely zero animations. You know what happens when you launch vim from CLI? It starts up. No animations. CLI is a pain to work with at times, but this aspect is so critical to putting a smile on the users face. Everything would instantly become insanely fast. I understand the value of animations - they're there to provide context, where something slides in and slides out from. This is fine for iPhone. But not for a workstation. I also understand that I can disable motion in accessibility settings but it still doesn't disable all of them. Also, that's not the default so that's a moot point. This is such a low hanging fruit to speed up things, but alas, we have UX/UI designers that insist on "sleek" and "sexy" UX/UI without delving into the fundamentals of what makes a product or software pleasant to use. While you're at it, you'd also improve the UX - battery life because you're not churning transparency effects and motion blur through the GPU pipes. Yes, battery life is "UX" IMO.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
taspeotis 7y ago
There is a “Reduce Motion” setting in iOS that speeds some things up a little bit.
- systemvoltage 7y ago
  I knew this would come up, thus I already addressed it in my comment above. That's not the default. And it still doesn't feel good - because animations are at the core of the UX/UI of Apple software. IMO the software needs to be designed from ground up with strict understanding of productivity and less marketing/design/aesthetics/animation. "Reduce motion" seems like an after thought hidden deep in the accessibility settings.

darkerside 7y ago

I anticipate hating this. I don't see how a morphing cursor can ever be learned in a way that is efficient over the long term. Still, we've stagnated for too long in our touchscreen UI design. I'm glad to see Apple trying something new.

Grustaf 7y ago

This article is very confusing, the video is clearly an ad by Apple, but it only seems to appear in this article, and the article itself is not marked as an ad. What is actually going on?