guy and when I saw FutureSplash for the first time, I knew it was going to
be huge for UI. But at the same time, I immediately realized that anything
that needlessly slows down the user is detrimental to the user experience.
Animation, by definition, takes time. The entire concept of
FutureSplash/Flash was predicated on a timeline. Literally something that
takes time. And this was back in the day of struggling to optimize web pages
to load faster over a 28.8 modem.
The speed problem with the Flex tree is mostly that it animates the
expanding and collapsing. It's entirely possible to create a swf menu tree
that switches states immediately without the animation. It would be an
interesting comparison then to see an "instant" Flash based tree menu with
the XUL one. I know there are other issues with Flash speed than just
animation.
That said, there are reasons to animate behaviors. Animation can allow the
user to have a better understanding of what the result of their interaction
was. If things happen too quickly, a user can miss the result or the causal
relationship. The result of their action may happen so quickly and in a
different enough location from the user's visual field of focus that they
miss the event. If the user's result is different from the user's
expectation and happens "instantaneously" without visual cues of a cuasal
relationship, the user may percieve it as a system problem. Think of the
modal error dialogs that suddenly appear and you don't know what you did.
Finding the balance between enough animation for visual cues of cause/effect
and fast enough to not feel "sticky" is tough. I agree with you though that
a lot of Flash apps don't get it right. And a problem is that the animation
speed is partly tied to computer speed, so the user experience isn't always
predictable.
-Kevin
> XUL.
>
> http://67.124.145.42/XUL/XULSampleTreeMenu.xul
>
> Put this up, side-by-side with the Flex Code Explorer at:
>
> http://macromedia.com/software/flex/?promoid=home_prod_flex_111703#
>
> Expand enough folders on each to get the window scrolling. Then
> expand/collapse the top node.
>
> Why is Flash so slow?
>
> Thoughts!
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