Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone

Interesting technical look at the design of Android’s graphics and event processing by Andrew Munn, trying to explain why it feels so laggy compared to iOS and Windows Phone:

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

• UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
• UI rendering has normal priority

[…] This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritize UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

William Gibson on The Setup | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: William Gibson on The Setup

This man has his priorities in order:

Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off.
Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.

User Interface Programming in the (Near) Future | Bruce Eckel

User Interface Programming in the (Near) Future

In my article on JavaScript, I observed that we need a new language that generates good and safe JavaScript, so that you no longer have to think about either JavaScript issues or cross-browser problems. Little did I know that the solution(s) had already appeared in the form of JQuery and CoffeeScript.

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Gap Theory of UI Design

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Gap Theory of UI Design

Yours truly, speaking at Webstock in New Zealand back in February, taking a tour of the entire history of Apple’s graphical user interfaces, and forming a basic theory about the philosophical difference between the old way (pre-Mac OS X) and new way.