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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: "animations" in oxygen style
From:       Hugo Pereira Da Costa <hugo.pereira () free ! fr>
Date:       2009-10-23 1:56:20
Message-ID: 4AE10D44.8090607 () free ! fr
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John Tapsell wrote:
> 2009/10/23 Hugo Pereira Da Costa <hugo.pereira@free.fr>:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been committing changes to oxygen window decoration and oxygen
>> style for the last few month now. In the decoration to include most of
>> the features that were in the "nitrogen" windeco; in the style, mostly
>> to fix bugs. For kde 4.4, I'd like to add a bunch of (on/off) switchable
>> "animations" to the style, cause I've always disliked "instantaneous"
>> state changes. I'm thinking of
>> - 'smooth' (as opposed to immediate) glow of buttons, sliders,
>> scrollbars, everything that glows, on hover
>> - same thing when getting focus
>> - smooth transition between active and inactive state
>>     
>
> Out of interest, have any UI designers given their input on this subject?
>
> I personally don't like the animations because it makes everything
> feel very 'heavy'.  E.g. if I hover over a scrollbar/button and there
> is a delay before it's glowing, I'm going to feel that the machine is
> being slow and unresponsive.
>
> IMHO
>   
just to be precise: we're talking of 50 -> 200 msec (max) transitions, 
and naturally, they could be switched off.

as for 'UI' designer, I've been talking with Nuno about this, who likes 
the idea (because it would make 'glow' more 'physical'), and dislike 
some more fancy animations I put into Nitrogen (like the toolbar hover 
square following the mouse rather than fading in/out).

I think that well-done animations, meaning: they represent a "natural" 
behavior of the object you interact with (as opposed to: my widgets 
starts to do fancy useless things, spin around, escape the mouse, etc), 
then improve user interaction, rather than makes the system look heavy.
See, e.g. Qt toolbars detach/attach animations.
Now, as to define what is "natural" animation, is where discussing with 
people comes into play (hence the email)

> John
>  
>   
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>   

 
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