Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Solid UIs and framerate



What's a solid framerate for touch UIs?

5 comments:

marcus said...

awesome. solid is the new black!

tobiwan said...

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

Good explanation! It's crucial for a UI to have high fps for it to feel luxurious and snappy.

Staffan Lincoln said...

Since posting this movie, I've had comments from engineers who tell me, that while high framerate certainly helps, there are other things that can wreck the feeling of solidity.

1. It takes a certain amount of time to process the finger input. If that part of the software is slow, you've got that slippery feeling anyway.

2. Most phones today use Double Buffering, to prevent flickering when you draw to the screen. In some instances, you can get better framerates with Triple Buffering. Look it up on Wikipedia.

James Haliburton said...

For the philosophy nerds amongst us, this is closely related to Heidegger's distinction of Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand which describes how we understand the world, and how things are distinctly different when they're "broken".

Obligatory Wikipedia quotes below:

"Presence-at-hand is not the way things in the world are usually encountered, and it is only revealed as a deficient or secondary mode, eg, when a hammer breaks it loses its usefulness and appears as merely there, present-at-hand. When a thing is revealed as present-at-hand, it stands apart from any useful set of equipment but soon loses this mode of being present-to-hand and becomes something, for example, that must be repaired or replaced."

"However, in almost all cases we are involved in the world in a much more ordinary, and more involved, way. We are usually doing things with a view to achieving something. Take for example, a hammer: it is ready-to-hand; we use it without theorizing. In fact, if we were to look at it as present-at-hand, we might easily make a mistake. Only when it breaks or something goes wrong might we see the hammer as present-at-hand, just lying there."

Viv Chawda said...

Really cool!!! Short & to-the-point.
Some pretty "Solid" metaphors you used in there!