alt Hacker NewsI'm sure it just my personal preference but I hate animations. Most often they do little other than slow an application down i.e. the code of the application could finish the task almost instantaneously but for the sake of appearance, they make it take longer to finish. I would much prefer no animations in applications. If the animation is there to disguise some actual slow response, just let me wait, give me jarring screen changes. please. Maybe app designers could still include all the animations for "smoothness", "premium look" or "sizzle" but please include an "expert" mode that just turns everything off.
Some years ago, I attended an informal demo of some application we built. The engineer who had worked on the UI was showing an animation of the initial splash screen. It was only 5 seconds or so but I asked him whether there was an option to disable it. He said there wasn't. I then asked if he didn't think that a user, running this many times, was going to get very tired of seeing it run every time and want to just show the home window immediately on start. I said I knew I would. I told him that regardless of how "cool" it looked, when you see the same thing a few times, it can become annoying leaving the user pissed off because its out of their control. I don't know what happened after that. Since I didn't have any authority to request changes, I was probably ignored.