

UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android - kentnguyen
http://kentnguyen.com/ios/ui-responsiveness-ios-osx-android-windows/

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blinkingled
Speaking of anecdotes, I have always found Windows more responsive than OS X
to the point where I have completely switched to Win 7 - mouse handling and
screen drawing is definitely superior on Windows.

However it is easier on Windows to mess up the experience - install some
crappy antivirus or other messy program and it is a piece of cake to make
Windows feel laggy.

~~~
brudgers
That and considering that shrink wrapped consumer anti-virus has become paid
malware (reports your browsing history, slows down your machine, and renews on
your credit card automatically), it is unsurprising that Microsoft provides
no-cost anti-virus which is both fast and unobtrusive.

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ender7
I don't really have an opinion on Windows vs. OS X, but I have been extremely
impressed with iOS's graphical performance.

It's not just that they have good framerate - even Android can get good
average framerate. The amazing thing about iOS that it gets amazing maximum
frame delay, i.e. the space between frames is almost never more than 33ms
(~30fps). On Android you frequently run into tiny little hiccups in frame
delay that might not impact its measured FPS, but are certainly noticeable to
the human eye. The result is that it just doesn't feel as smooth.

I don't know how Apple achieved this. It's certainly not perfect - you can
occasionally get an iDevice to freeze for a few hundred milliseconds, but
those are very rare occurrences. It's _as if_ they have a real-time guarantee
built into the system, but I don't think they actually have one. Which is a
pretty amazing accomplishment.

~~~
zokier
This is why _good_ game hardware (CPU/GPU) benchmarks measure minimum
framerate in addition to average. There was some site that measured 99th
percentile framerates too, which seemed like a good idea.

edit: Example of better measurements:
<http://techreport.com/articles.x/22151/6> Notice how Radeons have lower avg
fps but the framerate seems more stable.

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fudged
I love OSX, but objectively speaking, "The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at
least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice
that." [http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-
mous...](http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse-
annoyances/)

~~~
daed
To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about
how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair.
Noticeably slower than windows.

~~~
lobster_johnson
I think one of the reasons is that OS X provides automatic double-buffering of
window content at the OS level (it also has a somewhat different drawing model
than Windows), which adds a bit of latency but reduces flicker. Another factor
is that Mac apps typically adapt themselves to the size of a window, and
resizing will trigger a redraw of _everything_. Apps like Mail have always
been really slow at redrawing themselves, whereas Chrome is very fast.

OS X was written from the ground up to be graphics-intensive. From very early
on, Quartz, OS X's compositing manager, has been using the GPU to render
windows to OpenGL textures, essentially using the graphics card's very fast 3D
support to render a 2D screen.

Windows's classic GDI (which has been replaced by Aero, afaik, but I guess
most apps are still GDI) is considerably simpler, and leaves the drawing
entirely to the application. This is the reason you see a lot more redraw
flickering in Windows apps. Some apps are so slow at redrawing that when you
resize the window to make it bigger, you can see the new unpainted areas
filled with various garbage (or with some default background colour at best)
before the actual content comes in. To create smooth, non-flickering widget
drawing in Windows you have always been forced to do the double-buffering
yourself.

Even in Windows 7 there is a lot of redraw flickering. I'm particularly
annoyed about how the mouse cursor tend to flicker randomly -- eg. when
Internet Explorer is loading a page -- which is such a small, trivial detail,
but one that ends up making the entire OS _feel_ shoddily built.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Oh, and OS X actually resizes windows at a fixed frame rate. You can change
the rate with:

    
    
       defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

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zobzu
There's many reasons to prefer OSX over Windows (and vice-versa)

But OSX UI certainly never has been reacting faster than Windows UI. Things
like opening dirs, menu navigation, window resizing, etc is much faster in
Window and its been that way since OSX started (OS9 and prior had a fast UI).

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mariusmg
Unless people can back this up with hard facts they simply shouldn't post
these kinds of stuff.

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dbcooper
This submission needed some actual data ...

~~~
tambourine_man
My thoughts exactly. I was exited to read it, as this is the kind of thing
that sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares, but was disappointed. No
mesurament, nothing.

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dristic
I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from
Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple
things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal
are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.

~~~
ben_straub
OSX has definite advantages here.

1\. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the
Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured
ourselves against.

2\. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of
"wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in
less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with
jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no
system standard for horizontal scrolling.

3\. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the
windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-
compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers
to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the
start.

~~~
neebz
regarding #2..

I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows
was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that
(maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how
much crap scrolling is in Windows.

~~~
emehrkay
I currently have a vm of windows 7 open on my mac with the host file open in
notepad. Two lines are selected (as I needed to copy them from time to time).
If that window loses focus, the selection stays, but if I click the titlebar
to that window, giving it focus again, those two lines are unselected.

There are many many quirks like this in Windows that you only notice once you
use a different window manager.

~~~
tjoff
Sigh... this is an issue with your VM and not Windows.

~~~
emehrkay
You're right. The deselection doesnt happen if I click the titlebar, but it
does if I click the content area (that doesnt happen in OS X, I havent checked
any Linux window managers).

~~~
tjoff
Of course it does, when you click the content area you reposition the cursor
and thus deselects the text. The alternative would be to not be able to
reposition the cursor when you bring focus to the window which presents other
"quirks" if you look at it from other angles (and it of course needs to be
consistent, if you can't reposition the cursor why would you be able to press
a button if the window isn't active? etc.).

OS X is quite unique in this and probably stems from the use of common menus
for different windows, which also makes it uniquely inadequate for handling
multiple monitors. I just can't take a WM that doesn't handle multiple
monitors well seriously.

~~~
emehrkay
I, and a host of others, work fine with multiple monitors..

I'm sure if people were presented with both options; regain focus and lose
selection vs keepi g selection, they'd choose the keep selection. It's as if
someone used the computer and said "you know what would be useful?..."

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zyb09
Well there's no denying iOS is the king of responsiveness in the mobile
sector, but to be honest, I can't really say the same thing on OS X vs Windows
7. I use both on a daily basis and Win7 is definitely the most rock solid OS
Microsoft ever put out. For example, when an application crashes Windows just
kills it and everything is fine. On OS X when something crashes, you can
usually Force Close, but sometimes the process just can't be killed. Also it
feels OS X memory management almost requires an SSD nowadays.

There are other things, which makes me like OS X more, but being faster or
more stable is not one of them.

~~~
christoph
I can't agree with this enough. I use both daily and my feelings match yours
100%.

I find crashes far more disruptive on OS X - argh...the dreaded spinning beach
ball. Windows app crashes (when they happen) rarely cause me any harm beyond
restarting that single app and telling Windows I don't want to send a bug
report to MS.

I'm always blown away when picking up the iPad just how seamlessly I can fly
between different apps, tabs, airplay, etc.

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runjake
I have experienced the exact opposite of what this person experienced.

I use both Windows and OS X all through the day and while the response on both
is adequate, the Core 2 Quad Windows 7 box is much more responsive than my MBP
with the high end 15" i7. They both have 8GB RAM -- but then again, my Core 2
Duo Thinkpad X200 feels more responsive, and requires fewer resources.

I've never experienced or heard of the "infamous" cloned dialogs bug on
Windows 7, but oddly, I have experienced it on OS X. Conversely, I've never
experienced the reported cursor lag on OS X.

Like I said, I find both OSes perfectly good, but the post just seems suspect
to me.

Now, if only Microsoft would integrate a _well-supported_ , _well-integrated_
, native bash/zsh. I can't bring myself to like Powershell.

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Schlaefer
I never thought I would say this: but I miss the OS X spinning-wheel-o-death …
on my non-current generation iOS device. Sometimes the software just does
nothing for a noticeable amount of time and you don't know if it didn't got
the input or just hangs.

~~~
freehunter
I find myself holding my phone against my ear occasionally to see if I can
hear the drive spinning. I feel like a fool every time when I remember there
are no moving parts, but if my Zune would hang, or my iPod before that, I
could tell if it was hung or if it was just crunching away.

That's one thing I really miss since I went to using an Ubuntu HP Touchpad
instead of a laptop, there's no flashing hard drive indicator to let me know
if it's still working or if it's just hung.

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baddox
I completely agree with the iOS vs. Android responsiveness difference, but
completely disagree that Windows 7 on a fast PC with an SSD is unresponsive.
I've literally never had any of those problems on my Windows 7 gaming machine.

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bratsche
Another thing which OSX has done for a long time that I really liked is that
everything syncs to vertical refresh. It doesn't actually speed anything up,
but it gives the perception that things are smoother and more responsive. You
don't see the 'tearing' effect that you often see on other systems when you
drag windows around the screen.

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darreld
I use both platforms with a MacBook Pro/Lion being my main machine. I have
always felt that my Windows 7 machine is snappier in starting apps and
generally moving around the desktop. In fact, if Windows 7 were *nix based I
would probably switch to it as my primary. The command processor situation
feels pretty hopeless to me in Windows.

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badkangaroo
Is this a troll thread? if so 10/10

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aresant
My favorite explanation of this phenomenon, beyond the visual demonstration,
is that lag time reminds the human mind that it is interfacing with a machine.

Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between
the user and his work.

UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here:

<http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html>

