Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
IMHO good animations are good design. Apple does a great job here. They display the minimum animation necessary for you to understand. You open an app and you see it opening.<p>Text terminals are terrible for something I need to do every single day: Showing others what I am doing on the computer.<p>Without animations you are like a person with autism  disorder: It works for you but nobody that is watching you can understand what you are doing, you are in your world. You do a key combination you know(but others do not) and the screen changes instantly.<p>Repeat this a few times and you have a lot of confused people in your audience.<p>I agree that we need everything: something extremely fast, intuitive while beautiful and useful and extremely easy(and cheap and fast) to program.<p>But nobody has done it because it is hard as playing violin to be able to design a simple design alone, let alone make it fast. In the real world you need to pick your priorities, to constantly triage and make decisions.