Every Frame Perfect

All I can think seeing those examples is how macOS went from beautiful to utterly jank in the last 10 years.

It feels like this could get significantly worse with Apple introducing folding devices. There's already a good number of iOS form factors that need to be supported, and now you need to be able to transition between form factors too. It feels like the ability to carefully handcraft nice interfaces is going down, as combinations go up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461226 https://cupertinolens.com/2026/06/09/wwdc-2026-apple-is-fold...

Can we get Apple to employ Niki and have him lead design please

Animation should convey meaning, not achieve pixel-perfect morphs between states.

When iOS first launched, some of the brilliance was in how UI elements transformed into one another—a title in the title bar becoming a "back" button on the left, for instance. There were no intricate morphs, just a simple cross-dissolve between two elements shown briefly at the same time. It read as meaningful without being literal.

The Crop/Adjust example doesn't hold up here, because the two modes don't share a focus. The crop animation is deliberately different: it emphasizes the cropping controls at the edges of the image that you might otherwise miss, prepping you visually for the task and tying the controls into the image workspace. Adjust mode has no direct controls on the image itself, so the transition out should differ. The mismatch is the point, not a flaw.

For most UI, you don't need pixel-perfect morphs between small elements. The real job of animation and behavior is to convey meaning and context. Make your transitions pixel-perfect and most people would never notice the difference.

This blog makes me appreciate my browser's reading mode

Now I have to get Ubuntu/Wayland/winit/wgpu/rend3/egui/wine to work.

From a game broadly considered to have industry-best animations: https://imgur.com/gallery/donkey-kong-super-smash-bros-ultim...

A really infuriating example of this is the Windows Photos app (or whatever it is called this month) where scrolling through a photo album will show every image jumping around as it first shows them at some arbitrary scale, and then fits them to the window.

Lazy, lazy development.

"Job done, boss! Ready to ship to... checks notes... 3 billion users!"

"Did you test it?"

"Test? I thought we had a QA department!"

"Nah, we fired all of them a decade ago. You're the QA now."

This silly pretentiousness goes a long way to explain why it took so long for Wayland to even be usable.

I get that this is the way of the world, but I still think we'd have been be better off with, you know, real attention paid to classic free/open source ideas (like not breaking backward compatibility.)

Thanks, I hate it.

Bold words for the site which makes my eyes bleed.

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The thing about UI animation is that even if no tween frame was ever hinky I'd still turn it off because it's an anti-pattern. It's there to look good on a retail shelf, not to improve day to day usage.

I would love to understand these people, really!

On a personal level, if thing works - I say, cool, lets focus on something else now.

But I have worked with people who are similar to the author and we will get into the conversation:

    - they: wait, but the bundle size is 2.4Mb, it can be improved a lot
    - me: by how much? and we have 10k users/day and we have cache policy setup
    - they: we can reduce it to 1Mb, imagine saving 10k*1.4Mb every day
    - me: yeah, but its not costing us much, if you focus on making it perfect your salary will cost us 2 years of outbound traffic cost.
    - they: no, but its not perfect

How do I get there? What are the resources I can read and learn from to look at things to make them perfect?