4 ms·

It's not very hard to engineer software with these two constraints at the same time: * Must feel very responsive * Network requests can take up to 500ms end to

• alightsoul 1mo ago
  That's why phones and windows use animations. You can also use intersitials related to the product you sell. Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background. For example in the interstitial, use an animation that takes up a small portion of the screen and not just a simple spinner or loading icon. Something more complicated with 2 or more things moving or changing at once.
  • ddejohn 1mo ago
    > Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background This gave me a chuckle because I personally hate things like watching the browser jump through 50+ redirects when logging into a website.
    • alightsoul 1mo ago
      My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"
      • lazide 1mo ago
        Power users absolutely hate this mindset. It’s resulted in Apple animations taking seconds for something that was done before the animation even started.
        • 0cf8612b2e1e 1mo ago
          The delay in filing email in iOS is incredible. Selecting and moving a single message can take over a second, even with animations disabled. Maddening for what should be an instantaneous action.
      • inigyou 1mo ago
        Sometimes. Not by default.
      • jtari3333 1mo ago
        Literally the first thing I do is disable all animations when setting up an os
  • jbstack 1mo ago
    If your app absolutely must rely on the cloud for every one of its interactions, then fine. If not, you're just applying band-aids to a problem of your own making. Many apps could easily be local only, or local first. If you're not constantly accessing the network for information which could be stored locally, then you don't need to hide your app's slowness behind animations.
    • alightsoul 1mo ago
      Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run anywhere come true with no installation required. Cloud based is more convenient for the user and the developer, at the cost of app runtime speed
      • xstas1 1mo ago
        I like this example. A lot of people would prefer to use PowerPoint because they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint, removes features, discontinues the product, or goes bankrupt.
        • lazide 1mo ago
          Difficulty - Microsoft retroactively cancelling lifetime licenses.
          • inigyou 1mo ago
            Let them sue you if they want to.
            • lazide 1mo ago
              They literally unlicense the product out from under you as part of windows update. You’re the one having to sue, unless you never connect your machine to the internet anyway.
  • duskdozer 1mo ago
    I don't doubt that was an original justification, but most of what I see are not for this purpose. Most of the time they're just adding unnecessary delay and CPU cycles.
  • lazide 1mo ago
    I absolutely hate this shit, because my goal is actually doing something in a reasonable amount of time.
• otterley 1mo ago
  It isn’t, but at the same time, smart hackers were working with highly constrained PC hardware in the 1980s and early 1990s and were cranking surprisingly good performance out of it. Folklore.org has plenty of stories about it, and John Carmack’s early career history is very impressive. We mustn’t forget the demo scene hackers either.
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    Recently I tried an approach of "just write the f*** code" instead of using infinite abstractions on a new UI side project. So for instance when you scroll, it shifts the pixels and just redraws the new exposed area. This is how stuff worked in the 90s. And it's blazing fast and uses very little memory. It's easy to mess up redraw code like that - in my case, when the window goes past the screen border and the pixels to copy aren't there. That's a bug we also had a lot of in the 90s.