alt Hacker NewsOne thing I will never understand is why do me need to have animations at all? There is zero value on them. Worse I'm inclined to believe that they introduce a nasty amount of bugs and they also need to be maintained.
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Animations give you clues as to what is happening and how to undo it. A great example is the macOS “genie effect” when minimising windows. A first time user who clicked the minimise button on a window and saw it simply disappear would be lost as to where it went or how to get it back. Even as it appeared on the Dock, the lack of animation there as well could be imperceptible or the user might be unable to see what changed.
By having a clear animation which indicates where the window is being moved to, it’s obvious where the window went and thus how to recover it.
Good animations do a lot for how the app feels. Like all code, they need to be kept in sync when related parts of the code change, of course, so yes, they're a non-zero development and maintenance burden.
So what I don't get is the need to have half-assed animations in a half-assed app. You can add them once everything else is perfect.