OS Animations : The appearance of speed.


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OS Animations : The appearance of speed.

(For some reason the Youtube videos won't embed in this thread, so you'll have to click them)

First off this is not a Windows 8 hate thread just a slight ponder / obervation.

The one thing I?ve never quite understood, is the windows 8 spinning dot animation.

Don?t get me wrong Windows 8 is a very speedy OS, but the appearance of speed the animation gives is slow. When the animation first starts, it goes very fast down the right side, and then slowly tries to make its way up the left. It?s that climb which for some reason gives the appearance of sluggishness.

In comparison when I turn on my Samsung Fascinate with the newest CyanogenMod 10,

I am greeted with an animation which gives the appearance of fast speed, even if it?s not the fastest phone.

I think they play different roles. One role is to appear fast, the other is to appear slow. I always thought it was a subtle way to tell the user that they have a PC that isn't "fast enough" and should upgrade, or a developer to make a better app.

I tend to ignore boot animations on the whole but the boot animation used for CyanogenMod would look awesome on a PC. The boot animation for Windows 8 is really boring but as I own an SSD boot animations don't bother me too much.

I almost never see that animation, even in apps. Somehow, the post RTM/pre GA app updates have sped them up to the point that the UI fully loads before the splash screen starts showing the dots. As far as the boot screen goes, I'm not too bothered by the 10 seconds of spinning dots that I see every month or so.

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