[jasamer]

The page turn animation was truly excellent. I have seen a few other apps/sites try to copy it, some of them did it pretty well. But one detail I’ve never seen anyone else do: the text of the curled page is “distorted” in 3D, as one would expect of a real page. The closer the letters are to the part of the page that’s orthogonal to the screen, the more the are squished.

It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.

[maram]

>>The page turn animation was truly excellent.

iPhone iOS design used to be excellent. Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016: “ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.”

https://medium.com/@maram5/could-the-iphone-sales-decline-be...

[lostmsu]

At some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?

[peterkelly]

I don't expect this will happen. There's a good reason why floppy disks are no longer used, but I would be surprised if physical books ever go away.

Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.

[lxgr]

Sure, but how much closer to the physical book reading experience does a page flip animation really get us?

In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...

I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

On the contrary, I much prefer reading from a tablet or a smartphone. Unlike printed books, they glow in the dark!

[Retric]

Glowing in the dark is as much a bug as a feature. Lit screens work best in a dark room, where a reading light is more pleasant when you pause reading to do something else.

I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.

[real-dino]

I use a headtorch, and then end up staying awake for 2 hours after.

[Tagbert]

An e-ink reader does it better because the front lighting is less glaring and the overall image is more stable. It’s hard to get a phone screen to the right brightness level for reading in the dark, but an ereader will have a very dim front light that you only notice when the room is completely dark.

[kiririn]

Do any exist with warm colour temperatures? My kindle paperwhite is at least 6500k and basically unusable without an external light source

[NotACop182]

There is something about owning a book and having your own hard library. I love to do almost everything on the phone; news, tv, videos, Ect.

Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.

[cokeandpepsi]

TBH I like the animation because it prevents accidental page flips for whatever reason

[spikeagally]

At some point. That point is a long long way away.

[lostmsu]

Are you sure? There's an entire generation of people born after 2000 who probably read more electronic books than physical ones.

[petilon]

User Interface that is easy to imagine as a physical object is easier to figure out. It doesn't matter if the user is familiar with the physical object being emulated on the screen. Because laws of physics are still applicable even if you haven't seen such a physical object in real life.

The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.

[defaulter4now]

That's a cheap assumption without any data to back it up. What does the 3D animation cost in terms of CPU power?

[spikeagally]

I don’t have any data to back it up but I doubt that. Schools are still mostly using paper text books. And I reckon school libraries are still the main source of books for kids (who typically don’t have money to buy books). Family members who want to buy you a book as a gift, will do that on paper as gifting ebooks is trickier and less personal.

To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.

[SanjayMehta]

College students here are almost all using PDFs on their laptops.

Especially engineering.

Tried conducting an open book test this year and was met with consternation. Had to go with an open laptop test instead.

[s3p]

Difference of opinion. Others may believe that point is today.

[spikeagally]

They’d be wrong. It’s not opinion. Paper books are clearly not anachronistic currently.

[tim333]

"Print books out-sell eBooks 4-to-1" - recent data.

[musicale]

The new animation hurts my brain also.

I don't know if it's nostalgia or what but the flat design seems charmless compared to the Forstall-era skeuomorphic design. And the vanilla sameness and uniformity makes it harder to distinguish things. It reminds me a bit of shelving books by size and color rather than by content.

I recently noticed a bunch of electric street lamps that are clearly modeled on gaslamps - they appear to have little chimney vents as well as wide pipes for the nonexistent gas, and they seem designed to shield the LED/CFL/etc. fixture from wind and rain. Mostly non-functional design elements, and I've only seen a few dozen actual gas streetlamps in cities, but I still find them charming.

[meindnoch]

>It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.

It's not possible with public UIKit / CoreAnimation APIs. Those only support homogenous linear transformations (i.e. 4x4 matrix). You may try using the private CAMeshTransform API to achieve such an effect: https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/

[ladberg]

Wow, I’m shocked that Apple lets one of their employees keep that blog post up.

[meindnoch]

I don't think Bartosz was working for Apple in 2014 when the blogpost was made.

[Grustaf]

You can actually do it in UIKit by chopping it up into strips and using affine transforms, I've seen it done. Not that I think this is UIKit, it's probably a very simple OpenGL shader.

[zffr]

I doubt it was OpenGL/Metal directly. It is more likely to be something like CAMeshTransform (https://ciechanow.ski/mesh-transforms/)

[Grustaf]

Why? It's almost trivial to do it in OpenGL or Metal and the result will be better.

[BuckyBeaver]

But did it alternate between the left and right pages? The swipe from left page to right page shouldn't have been a page-turn; it should be a horizontal scroll across the book's binding. The swipe after THAT should be a page-turn.

[wahnfrieden]

It fits our mental model of one sided printed pages

[BuckyBeaver]

How many single-sided books do people read?

[minusf]

maybe i'm just unsophisticated but what exactly is the point of it? all this work for basically nothing. and we wonder why our apps are bloated and need ridiculously overpowered hw.

[ben_w]

There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.

Is it the reflectance/emission? Perhaps, Kindles are better than iPads; is it the resolution? Perhaps, retina iPads are better than pre/non-retina tablets; is it the tactile sensation? Perhaps, I find matt paper better than the gloss of many magazines, and the new Paperwhite is half way between on that score.

Perhaps I'm just remembering good times from my childhood, and skeuomorphisms are a way to catch that.

But no, a 3D animation like this is not the reason why apps are bloated. Other similar animations were smooth on a 450 MHz G3.

[Aaargh20318]

> There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.

For me it’s the exact opposite. I read a lot, mostly on my Kindle Oasis (139 titles this year so far according to Kindle Insights) and on the very rare occasion I read a paper book I’m reminded how annoying reading paper books is.

There are several issues with reading paper books:

First, the physical format, long books are thick and unwieldy. There is no comfortable way to read in bed. You either read laying on your back, holding the book above your face, which is uncomfortable to hold and tires your arms. When laying on your side the fact that books fold in the middle is super annoying, if you open the book at a 90° angle you can only really read one page and you have to turn yourself after every page. Holding it open fully also isn’t comfortable.

Next, there is the light issue. Paper only reflects light, meaning you always need an external light source. It’s much easier for me to immerse myself in a story reading in a dark room. Another issue with external light is that you have to orient yourself relative to the light source. Again, when reading in bed this is a problem if your light source is on your nightstand. If you turn to a different side you are lying in your own shadow.

Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment. Getting my hands on them in the first place would also be a problem. I can browse books online and find something I’m in the mood for right now and be reading it in 30 seconds instead if waiting days for delivery. I can binge through a series in days instead of weeks.

No, I really don’t want to go back to dead tree books and I can’t believe people put up with the inconvenience when there is no longer a need to.

[disconcision]

i mostly agree... i think a lot of people haven't tried the more recent higher-end e-readers... i'd say both the oasis and the kobo forma are getting quite close to strict improvements on the trade paperback... i still love a good, well-worn <400 page mass-market paperback sometimes though, truly the greatest height of the dead-tree format. e-readers haven't seen dramatic technical improvement, but response times have gotten a lot faster, and manufacturers have pretty much all finally figured out physical buttons for page turning is the way to go.

last time i read a trade paper, the weight and lighting issues dominated any of the pleasant tactility of paper.

that said, i do miss the random-access characteristics of physical books: being able to have fingers between multiple pages to skip between sections and the ability to quickly visually binary-search for something. these seem solvable but require some master UI work

[qu4z-2]

> finally figured out physical buttons for page turning is the way to go

Oh thank goodness. I'm not sure how many more years my Kindle 4 has in it...

[ben_w]

My Kindle Keyboard only died at the start of November, FWIW.

[bentley]

> Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment.

The other side of that is discoverability. So much of my fondness for reading today comes from the fact that I grew up in a house packed with books, practically a shelf in every room, and as a child it was so easy to just pick a book off the shelf and start reading.

The Kindle Oasis is my preferred way to read now, but if when I was a child my dad had read everything electronically, would I be reading (e)books today, or would I have never read enough casually to develop a love of the medium?

That’s why in 2022 I keep the bookshelves in my house overflowing.

[iggldiggl]

Likewise, I find that browsing through a bookstore or library is still much more enjoyable than trying the same thing with an online shop when I don't have a certain book in mind and am just trying to discover some random bit of reading.

[BuckyBeaver]

It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it. This simple fact was ignored for the last 30+ years of OS vendors pushing inverse color schemes on us. I see it as a vestige of the "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s/early '90s, which sought to make the computer screen an analogy for a piece of paper. Or Apple's attempt to look "different."

Now all of a sudden people finally realized that reading dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day is a shitty way to work, and vendors have backpedaled clumsily to offering a hard-coded "dark mode." But we already had an even-better solution: Windows let users set up their own system-wide color scheme, from Windows 3.1 through XP or even Vista. Any properly-constructed application would inherit the system colors for various on-screen elements and guarantee legibility. If you wanted to change the look of all your applications, you had one central place to do it. And if, as a developer, you wanted to guarantee a color scheme, all you had to do was make sure you overrode both foreground and background colors.

But Microsoft actually REMOVED that capability just in time for it to become desirable to more people than ever. Brilliant.

[orbital-decay]

>It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it.

What's the difference? I've seen it repeated over and over and it never made any sense. If your screen is too bright compared to the environment, turn it down. The only practical difference seems to be uniformity - screens are much more uniform. No shadows, no dependency on the angle to the light source etc. Which is... great?

[quesera]

The first things that springs to my mind is that the spectrum of emitted light from an active display is different from that of reflected sunlight/artificial light off of paper made from pulp/linen/cotton.

Active displays can be fatiguing for a variety of reasons, including brightness as you mention, but also the "unnatural" light spectrum.

Also, of course, blue light is believed to affect your circadian rhythm, so can cause disturbances after sundown. Most ebook readers have adjustments for this though.

[BuckyBeaver]

It's a good question. One thing is that the brightness of the page will always be appropriate for the ambient light, since it is determined by that light.

Beyond that, I'd speculate that screens don't retain as much contrast when you turn their brightness down, compared to physical materials presenting similar "brightness" under ambient light. But really that's just some talking out the ass with no research to back it up.

[plonk]

Screens aren't precise and aren't natural. If you have good enough vision or a bad enough screen, you see that it's a bunch of squares that try to imitate shapes, and even have spaces between them.

Also, the lighting looks fake. Even on good modern screens, there's a billboard feeling I can't ignore. I think that's your reflectance/emission point; it's not light reflecting on an object like literally everything you look at, it's an object blasting light at you trying to make it look real.

[kaba0]

Even many low-end devices have better screens nowadays than to see pixels themselves. Also, I don’t get this “natural” point, reading itself is unnatural and not too healthy, not because of light reflection vs emission, but because focusing on one point for a long time, which is the same in both types of reading.

[drewbeck]

Joy and delight are ultimately liabilities, and humans will be better off if we remove the need for them.

[Gigachad]

HN would have us eat soy paste from a tube because normal food is bloated.

[yborg]

Not sure if ironic, but this is literally true. Remember Soylent, the food of the SV übermensch? Yeah.

[IOT_Apprentice]

I assume you are being sarcastic

[Tempest1981]

It brings joy to many users. Not all, granted.

The HW is already needed for games.

[fnordpiglet]

The books underlying required even more work and they’re just a bunch of bytes that accomplish nothing. Some of them are even about something made up entirely and serve no purpose.

[JustSomeNobody]

>all this work for basically nothing. and we wonder why our apps are bloated and need ridiculously overpowered hw.

Attention to detail. Craftsmanship.

Caring...

[neuralRiot]

Exactly this. The new animation looks cheap and carelessly made. Attention to detail is what separates excellent from mediocre products.

[jasamer]

This animation was super smooth on even the slowest iPad.

The point of it is: they were going to do a skeuomorphic animation, and they put the effort in to do it right. It's a level of polish that I really appreciate, even though it isn't really necessary for anything.

[ElFitz]

> even though it isn't really necessary for anything.

It is one of the best, if not the best, way of letting users know what their action will lead to, and of letting them explore the range of available actions.

By behaving similarly to a well-know interface, it simplifies discovery, lowers friction and reduces frustration.

So when smartphones and touch interfaces were new to most people, behaviours such as this one were major, although nearly invisible, product features.

Now? Yes, it mostly isn’t necessary to anything, but it was nice.

[Grustaf]

It's probably done on the GPU, requiring almost no power at all. As far as 3d graphics goes, it's very very simple.

[Groxx]

Yeah. Essentially no power and essentially no space was spent on that. It's barely more computationally complicated than sliding the page.

There are lots of things to dislike about feature and size bloat, but this is among the worst possible examples.

[jeromegv]

In this specific case, this worked on the first version of iBooks on the iPad 1 (which was famously underpowered)

[mensetmanusman]

Features will be removed until morale improves.

[Sunspark]

I have one app that does it, it doesn't do the corner curl, but it does do the side curl with the reverse text showing on the other side. It uses OpenGL to do it and that is how you can do it.

[asplake]

Tip: if you suffer from vertigo, disable the animation

[SanjayMehta]

I wonder why Apple didn't turn it into a setting, like "Reduce Animations."

Maybe if enough people ask for it, it might come back as an option.

[defaulter4now]

UI designers seem to bring about changes now, just to show you that they are busy somehow or that there's sorts of progress. The "Second Watershed" as Ivan Illich describes it in "Tools for Conviviality" has reached the Computer User Interface Design as well. How much more can they mutilate it, before they improve it by going back to iOS 1 design paradigm?

[AB1908]

Moon Reader seems to imitate it well enough.

[baxuz]

This was one of my favourite features of iBooks. :(