zlacker

>>jakela+(OP)
Every time I see animation discussed by designers, they're thinking about it in terms of polish and "delight", and then balancing those things with perceptual latency. It's not entirely incorrect, but a couple of minor nits:

1. Delight is overblown, in my opinion. I think most of the people truly delighted by fancy animation are just other designers.

2. It's more useful to think about state when deciding when to animate. Could the user have trouble perceiving the change in state that just occurred? If so, then use an animation to help them visualize what happened. I believe this is the primary reason to use an animation - all others are vanity.

>>daniel+Vn
Fully agreeing with this. I was also surprised that the appearance change of a button on mousedown is considered an animation here. ("Another purposeful animation is this subtle scale down effect when pressing a button.")

Isn't this just very basic optical feedback to indicate that a component is clickable at all and that the click was registered?

>>xg15+Lr
It fits both the dictionary and colloquial definitions of animation. If there is any domain specific jargon, surely that applies too. I can't understand why this wouldn't be considered an animation...

>>dfxm12+1u
I can see either side of it, but in my mind animation (in this context) means the generation and timed display of synthetic tween states to smooth the transition between the display of actual states. The mouse-down case is (in this context) an immediate change from the up- to down- states, without additional frames in between, so is not an animation by this particular domain-specific definition.

>>addaon+Vv
That makes sense. I think of it like visual movement, a difference in position over time. Even a single step represents a change in position, even if the time increment is very small. The transition is the animation, the duration would be 2 frames: up, and down.

In a nutshell: put two different frames in sequence, and you have an animation.