MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Question for community: eye candy a good thing?

chaley · 02-01-2016, 02:38 PM

Thanks to all who have responded.

I confess to being surprised by the level of antipathy to animations. Google and other app developers are clearly going the other way, even if it adds nothing. As evidence, consider the spinning "hamburger" that morphs into an arrow when you open a message in Gmail (Android 6).

On the other hand, dickloraine has a point. The animation in the video, or at least the exit animation, does provide information. It carries the eye back to the book that just was examined in book details. If you are coming back to a cover grid with 20 books showing, finding where you were becomes trivial.

The animations work in lollipop (Android 5) or better. On Android 4 nothing happens, and I am dropping Gingerbread and Honeycomb support in CC. This means that there isn't any animation on older devices. I know of no eink device running android 5 or later, so the animations won't happen there either.

It seems clear that I shouldn't spend any time to enable more of the android 5+ animations. I am not yet convinced that I should remove the one shown in the video. Fortunately I can wait. The "updated" version of CC will not be ready for some time (weeks, probably) and will require an alpha test.

Thanks again for the comments, both those already made and those that come later.

02-01-2016, 02:38 PM	#9
chaley Grand Sorcerer Posts: 12,476 Karma: 8025702 Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: Notts, England Device: Kobo Libra 2	Thanks to all who have responded. I confess to being surprised by the level of antipathy to animations. Google and other app developers are clearly going the other way, even if it adds nothing. As evidence, consider the spinning "hamburger" that morphs into an arrow when you open a message in Gmail (Android 6). On the other hand, dickloraine has a point. The animation in the video, or at least the exit animation, does provide information. It carries the eye back to the book that just was examined in book details. If you are coming back to a cover grid with 20 books showing, finding where you were becomes trivial. The animations work in lollipop (Android 5) or better. On Android 4 nothing happens, and I am dropping Gingerbread and Honeycomb support in CC. This means that there isn't any animation on older devices. I know of no eink device running android 5 or later, so the animations won't happen there either. It seems clear that I shouldn't spend any time to enable more of the android 5+ animations. I am not yet convinced that I should remove the one shown in the video. Fortunately I can wait. The "updated" version of CC will not be ready for some time (weeks, probably) and will require an alpha test. Thanks again for the comments, both those already made and those that come later.