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The page turn animation was truly excellent. I have seen a few other apps/sites try to copy it, some of them did it pretty well. But one detail I’ve never seen
by jasamer 4y ago
The page turn animation was truly excellent. I have seen a few other apps/sites try to copy it, some of them did it pretty well. But one detail I’ve never seen anyone else do: the text of the curled page is “distorted” in 3D, as one would expect of a real page. The closer the letters are to the part of the page that’s orthogonal to the screen, the more the are squished.
It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.
- baxuz 4y agoThis was one of my favourite features of iBooks. :(
- Sunspark 4y agoI have one app that does it, it doesn't do the corner curl, but it does do the side curl with the reverse text showing on the other side. It uses OpenGL to do it and that is how you can do it.
- minusf 4y agomaybe i'm just unsophisticated but what exactly is the point of it? all this work for basically nothing. and we wonder why our apps are bloated and need ridiculously overpowered hw.
- Tempest1981 4y agoIt brings joy to many users. Not all, granted. The HW is already needed for games.
- Grustaf 4y agoIt's probably done on the GPU, requiring almost no power at all. As far as 3d graphics goes, it's very very simple.
- Groxx 4y agoYeah. Essentially no power and essentially no space was spent on that. It's barely more computationally complicated than sliding the page. There are lots of things to dislike about feature and size bloat, but this is among the worst possible examples.
- ben_w 4y agoThere is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is. Is it the reflectance/emission? Perhaps, Kindles are better than iPads; is it the resolution? Perhaps, retina iPads are better than pre/non-retina tablets; is it the tactile sensation? Perhaps, I find matt paper better than the gloss of many magazines, and the new Paperwhite is half way between on that score. Perhaps I'm just remembering good times from my childhood, and skeuomorphisms are a way to catch that. But no, a 3D animation like this is not the reason why apps are bloated. Other similar animations were smooth on a 450 MHz G3.
- plonk 4y agoScreens aren't precise and aren't natural. If you have good enough vision or a bad enough screen, you see that it's a bunch of squares that try to imitate shapes, and even have spaces between them. Also, the lighting looks fake. Even on good modern screens, there's a billboard feeling I can't ignore. I think that's your reflectance/emission point; it's not light reflecting on an object like literally everything you look at, it's an object blasting light at you trying to make it look real.
- kaba0 4y agoEven many low-end devices have better screens nowadays than to see pixels themselves. Also, I don’t get this “natural” point, reading itself is unnatural and not too healthy, not because of light reflection vs emission, but because focusing on one point for a long time, which is the same in both types of reading.
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoIt's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it. This simple fact was ignored for the last 30+ years of OS vendors pushing inverse color schemes on us. I see it as a vestige of the "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s/early '90s, which sought to make the computer screen an analogy for a piece of paper. Or Apple's attempt to look "different." Now all of a sudden people finally realized that reading dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day is a shitty way to work, and vendors have backpedaled clumsily to offering a hard-coded "dark mode." But we already had an even-better solution: Windows let users set up their own system-wide color scheme, from Windows 3.1 through XP or even Vista. Any properly-constructed application would inherit the system colors for various on-screen elements and guarantee legibility. If you wanted to change the look of all your applications, you had one central place to do it. And if, as a developer, you wanted to guarantee a color scheme, all you had to do was make sure you overrode both foreground and background colors. But Microsoft actually REMOVED that capability just in time for it to become desirable to more people than ever. Brilliant.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThe books underlying required even more work and they’re just a bunch of bytes that accomplish nothing. Some of them are even about something made up entirely and serve no purpose.
- drewbeck 4y agoJoy and delight are ultimately liabilities, and humans will be better off if we remove the need for them.
- IOT_Apprentice 4y agoI assume you are being sarcastic
- Gigachad 4y agoHN would have us eat soy paste from a tube because normal food is bloated.
- yborg 4y agoNot sure if ironic, but this is literally true. Remember Soylent, the food of the SV übermensch? Yeah.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoFeatures will be removed until morale improves.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago>all this work for basically nothing. and we wonder why our apps are bloated and need ridiculously overpowered hw. Attention to detail. Craftsmanship. Caring...
- neuralRiot 4y agoExactly this. The new animation looks cheap and carelessly made. Attention to detail is what separates excellent from mediocre products.
- jeromegv 4y agoIn this specific case, this worked on the first version of iBooks on the iPad 1 (which was famously underpowered)
- jasamer 4y agoThis animation was super smooth on even the slowest iPad. The point of it is: they were going to do a skeuomorphic animation, and they put the effort in to do it right. It's a level of polish that I really appreciate, even though it isn't really necessary for anything.
- ElFitz 4y ago> even though it isn't really necessary for anything. It is one of the best, if not the best, way of letting users know what their action will lead to, and of letting them explore the range of available actions. By behaving similarly to a well-know interface, it simplifies discovery, lowers friction and reduces frustration. So when smartphones and touch interfaces were new to most people, behaviours such as this one were major, although nearly invisible, product features. Now? Yes, it mostly isn’t necessary to anything, but it was nice.
- meindnoch 4y ago>It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one. It's not possible with public UIKit / CoreAnimation APIs. Those only support homogenous linear transformations (i.e. 4x4 matrix). You may try using the private CAMeshTransform API to achieve such an effect: https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/ https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/
- Grustaf 4y agoYou can actually do it in UIKit by chopping it up into strips and using affine transforms, I've seen it done. Not that I think this is UIKit, it's probably a very simple OpenGL shader.
- maram 4y ago>>The page turn animation was truly excellent. iPhone iOS design used to be excellent. Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016: “ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.” https://medium.com/@maram5/could-the-iphone-sales-decline-be-attributed-to-the-new-ios-design-dcd0609d450e https://medium.com/@maram5/could-the-iphone-sales-decline-be...
- lostmsu 4y agoAt some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?
- spikeagally 4y agoAt some point. That point is a long long way away.
- s3p 4y agoDifference of opinion. Others may believe that point is today.
- spikeagally 4y agoThey’d be wrong. It’s not opinion. Paper books are clearly not anachronistic currently.
- AB1908 4y agoMoon Reader seems to imitate it well enough.
- asplake 4y agoTip: if you suffer from vertigo, disable the animation
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoBut did it alternate between the left and right pages? The swipe from left page to right page shouldn't have been a page-turn; it should be a horizontal scroll across the book's binding. The swipe after THAT should be a page-turn.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoIt fits our mental model of one sided printed pages
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoHow many single-sided books do people read?
- SanjayMehta 4y agoI wonder why Apple didn't turn it into a setting, like "Reduce Animations." Maybe if enough people ask for it, it might come back as an option.
- defaulter4now 4y agoUI designers seem to bring about changes now, just to show you that they are busy somehow or that there's sorts of progress. The "Second Watershed" as Ivan Illich describes it in "Tools for Conviviality" has reached the Computer User Interface Design as well. How much more can they mutilate it, before they improve it by going back to iOS 1 design paradigm?