5 ms·

It's a shame that Apple is negating that responsiveness with painfully slow transitions in iOS 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQC_W0c-C8 http://www.youtube.

• kmfrk 13y ago
  I have a sneaking, completely unsubstantiated suspicion that many of the weird transitions on iOS 7 are to hide choppy performance. They are definitely way too long for someone to have seriously considered it a good idea on its own. It drives me completely mental that I get a fade-in transition, just by turning on the lock screen of my iPad.
  • CamperBob2 13y ago
    Yeah, these kinds of shenanigans date back to the first 2G iPhone, and they were just as obvious at the time, too.
    • wiredfool 13y ago
      Try zoom rects, no later than '95 and System 6. Old school compact era.
  • ajross 13y ago
    That's not unlikely, and it's not insane either. Processes are getting bigger, frameworks are taking more memory, and things take longer to fetch back in on app transfers. So if you want the apps to be snappy, you have to make sure they're in memory. Android devices have settled on clubbing the problem over the head with 2G of RAM (basically keeping stuff from being paged out to start with), while Apple went with 1G and has to play more subtle tricks. Performance is about tradeoffs. The stuff measured in the article is response time of foreground apps. Getting the app into the foreground to begin with isn't free.
    • gtufano 13y ago
      Just to note that iOS have no paging (don't know about Android, but I suspect the same).
      • andrewaylett 13y ago
        It's definitely not paging in the traditional, OS-level sense, but the standard Android (and, I think, iOS) behaviour of providing applications with a framework to restart exactly where they left off should be pretty much the same in theory. In practice, not so much.
        • nucleardog 13y ago
          Err, I see no way in which the activity life cycle is like paging. In typical paging the application's memory is taken from RAM and placed onto a slower storage medium to free up RAM. In the activity life cycle, Android is just telling the app "you're in RAM, but you're not running" or "you're going to get killed because I need the space, if you want to give me a bit of state information I'll hang on to it in RAM for you". I don't see how the two are comparable at all, and I don't see how you could have paging without using a secondary storage.
      • ajross 13y ago
        Android and iOS make no use of swap, they certainly will page things out that can be ejected (so not process heap, but mapped disk pages, including executable data segments, etc...). There is a little more involved with Android, and no doubt a lot of hackery under the hood in iOS, but both these OSes are running kernels with traditional VM systems and they work.
  • Bud 13y ago
    I find some of the new transitions annoying, too, but it simply doesn't make any sense to say that they are "to hide choppy performance." We know this because the transitions are very smoothly-rendered. Which takes processing power; the animations and such would not be smooth if there was a CPU issue they were trying to cover up. It's an intentional decision. There's plenty of performance under the hood, or they wouldn't be able to afford the extra CPU cycles to draw fancy animations. That being said, I hope they shorten some of these transitions, as well. In many ways, iOS 7 is faster and more responsive, and so it'd be nice if it were faster in this way, too.
    • charleslmunger 13y ago
      Not really, the type of animations they're doing are very cheap and can be performed entirely on GPU, without using much memory bandwidth, I/O, or CPU time.
• bdcravens 13y ago
  One video is 3 months old; the other a month. Very likely there would be performance issues in beta software, to say nothing of the likelihood that there may have been debugging code left in that might not be in RTM.
  • blehn 13y ago
    Fair point, however I'm using the market build now and the transitions still feel unnecessarily slow.
• ryanmerket 13y ago
  5s user here. My transitions don't look like that.
  • BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
    Those videos were using a 5, not a 5s. Apples and apples.
• r00fus 13y ago
  In the 2nd link the comparison is using the beta of iOS7. Video uploaded Jun 16th. Comparing stable releases to prerelease software is a bullshit comparison.
• acqq 13y ago
  My even bigger problem is Safari: they made web content obviously faster to load, but changed UI to be unpredictable -- you almost never know when it is going to blend in the bigger URL top or the whole lower bar. By introducing changing screen that you don't control, they made the experience much worse. For the first time in years iPhone starts to behave like Windows before turn of annoying settings. And here I can't even turn them off. Jobs would simply not let them be.
  • Bud 13y ago
    It's not unpredictable; it's been out for three days. You simply have not learned to predict it. But it's very predictable, and I bet you'll be used to it within another day or two.
    • acqq 13y ago
      It is. Bumping at the end is predictable. But it appears even at the times when I just attempt to scroll the middle of the page that I view at the moment. Sometimes when I want it to appear, it doesn't. But more often it appears "just because."