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So why is the page flipping animation missing in iOS16? My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take ov

So why is the page flipping animation missing in iOS16? My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take over the performance critical code in Objective C for the page flipping animation.

nicoburns 4y ago
Yeah, it may well be they're using SwiftUI, which doesn't give them that control at all.
pixel_tracing 4y ago
Not really you can port or bridge that code over.
cellularmitosis 4y ago
You may already be aware of this, but it is very easy to mix Swift and ObjC in the same codebase. There’s nothing technical stopping them from plucking the ObjC page-turning transition into the Swift app.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  Swift and Objc? Sure. Swiftui and uikit? Not as easy. Is it technically possible? Yes. is it easy? Maybe not.
  - sebastien_b 4y ago
    Which seems to imply that Apple, which counts 1000+ engineers[1], and spent $5B+ on a “spaceship” campus[2], is just “lazy”. 1 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-for-its-biggest-ever-worldwide-developers-conference/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-... 2 https://www.weetas.com/article/apple-spaceship/ https://www.weetas.com/article/apple-spaceship/
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      It's not a question of laziness it's a question of prioritization and opportunity cost. The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already. The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I don't think it's what happened in this case, but extremely lazy crap makes it all the way to public releases for all the tech giants. Engineer count and cash-on-hand don't seem to have much to do with it.
    - rrdharan 4y ago
      I know this is in favor of your point but just wanted to note that Apple has way more than 1000 engineers, I think closer to 20,000…
    - skybrian 4y ago
      The size of a team working on one product at a large company has nothing to do with the size of the company or its real estate budget. Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better. Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
      - csande17 4y ago
        Whether it was the choice of an individual engineer or designer, or the choice of a high-level executive to not put anyone who cared about design on the Books team, the fact remains that Apple chose not to keep this animation. You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
        4y ago
  - Grustaf 4y ago
    On the contrary it's very, very easy, in both directions. They made integration very simple and powerful
  - myko 4y ago
    > Swiftui and uikit? It's pretty easy and basically required to do anything useful if you need to support iOS 14, or god forbid, iOS 13
TheTon 4y ago
I really doubt the issue is technical. The page curl rendering itself was implemented in Core Animation. The application side just set the parameters for the position of the curl. It worked well even on the original iPad. I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Maybe that was how Apple operated under Steve Jobs (developers would work days and nights to make Steve Jobs vision work despite technical challenges) but unfortunately it does not seem to be how Apple operates anymore. The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    The redesign is due to rewriting System Preferences in SwiftUI.
    - newaccount74 4y ago
      I wonder if the usability issues are a result of using Swift UI (because it's just too hard to make good UIs in SwiftUI) or because they just don't care about usability any more.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        I think, as with the questionable quality of the Catalyst-created macOS apps that preceded the new System Preferences, it was a desire to show off a new framework while it is still in a semi-beta unfinished state, let alone before the best practices for these new technologies have been devised yet.
dymk 4y ago
There is no way that the change was due to performance. The old page flipping animation was delightful, but in no way computationally significant on iPhones even 5 years ago.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  It was 'computationally significant' on Am486DX4/100 with that DHTML (Java applet actually). Every browser nowadays can imitate page flip with CSS only.
zffr 4y ago
My blind guess: The code for the page flip animation was old/complicated, and the engineer who wrote the code left the team. No one else felt comfortable maintaining the code, and Design saw this as an opportunity to simplify the UI.
Grustaf 4y ago
1. Swift is not slower than objective-c 2. They could keep this in Objective-C if they wanted to 3. It's most likely done on the GPU anyway

nicoburns 4y ago

Yeah, it may well be they're using SwiftUI, which doesn't give them that control at all.

pixel_tracing 4y ago

Not really you can port or bridge that code over.

cellularmitosis 4y ago

You may already be aware of this, but it is very easy to mix Swift and ObjC in the same codebase. There’s nothing technical stopping them from plucking the ObjC page-turning transition into the Swift app.

admax88qqq 4y ago
Swift and Objc? Sure. Swiftui and uikit? Not as easy. Is it technically possible? Yes. is it easy? Maybe not.
- sebastien_b 4y ago
  Which seems to imply that Apple, which counts 1000+ engineers[1], and spent $5B+ on a “spaceship” campus[2], is just “lazy”. 1 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-for-its-biggest-ever-worldwide-developers-conference/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-... 2 https://www.weetas.com/article/apple-spaceship/ https://www.weetas.com/article/apple-spaceship/
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    It's not a question of laziness it's a question of prioritization and opportunity cost. The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already. The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I don't think it's what happened in this case, but extremely lazy crap makes it all the way to public releases for all the tech giants. Engineer count and cash-on-hand don't seem to have much to do with it.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    I know this is in favor of your point but just wanted to note that Apple has way more than 1000 engineers, I think closer to 20,000…
  - skybrian 4y ago
    The size of a team working on one product at a large company has nothing to do with the size of the company or its real estate budget. Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better. Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
    - csande17 4y ago
      Whether it was the choice of an individual engineer or designer, or the choice of a high-level executive to not put anyone who cared about design on the Books team, the fact remains that Apple chose not to keep this animation. You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
      - 4y ago
- Grustaf 4y ago
  On the contrary it's very, very easy, in both directions. They made integration very simple and powerful
- myko 4y ago
  > Swiftui and uikit? It's pretty easy and basically required to do anything useful if you need to support iOS 14, or god forbid, iOS 13

TheTon 4y ago

I really doubt the issue is technical. The page curl rendering itself was implemented in Core Animation. The application side just set the parameters for the position of the curl. It worked well even on the original iPad. I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.

newaccount74 4y ago
Maybe that was how Apple operated under Steve Jobs (developers would work days and nights to make Steve Jobs vision work despite technical challenges) but unfortunately it does not seem to be how Apple operates anymore. The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  The redesign is due to rewriting System Preferences in SwiftUI.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    I wonder if the usability issues are a result of using Swift UI (because it's just too hard to make good UIs in SwiftUI) or because they just don't care about usability any more.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      I think, as with the questionable quality of the Catalyst-created macOS apps that preceded the new System Preferences, it was a desire to show off a new framework while it is still in a semi-beta unfinished state, let alone before the best practices for these new technologies have been devised yet.

dymk 4y ago

There is no way that the change was due to performance. The old page flipping animation was delightful, but in no way computationally significant on iPhones even 5 years ago.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
It was 'computationally significant' on Am486DX4/100 with that DHTML (Java applet actually). Every browser nowadays can imitate page flip with CSS only.

zffr 4y ago

My blind guess: The code for the page flip animation was old/complicated, and the engineer who wrote the code left the team. No one else felt comfortable maintaining the code, and Design saw this as an opportunity to simplify the UI.

Grustaf 4y ago

1. Swift is not slower than objective-c 2. They could keep this in Objective-C if they wanted to 3. It's most likely done on the GPU anyway