New In iOS 12: Interruptible Animations Let You Perform Actions Without Having To Wait For Transitions To Complete

As is always the case when Apple announces a new version of iOS, what was shown off during the WWDC opening keynote was not everything that iOS 12 had to offer.

There are plenty of little tidbits that did not warrant time on-stage but in the aggregate do go some way to making iOS feel the way it does. As far as iOS 12 is concerned there appears to be more of these tidbits than usual, and one of them may help explain why iOS 12 feels a little more fluid than prior releases.

The speed and fluidity at which iOS is able to move in-screen assets around has always been something that has set it apart from Google’s Android, and with Apple focusing on performance with its iOS 12 release, things are absolutely no different here.

As people have begun to share following on of the talks during WWDC last week, iOS 12 actually allows users to interact with what is going on on-screen even while animations are in flight. This means that if a user taps something which opens a new screen, parts of that new screen could well be workable while that animation continues.

The best example of this is when a user launches an app. With iOS 12 installed, if a user launches an app and decides to close it before it has fully opened, Springboard will interrupt the opening animation and close the app. Similarly, depending on the app in question, parts of its interface may work just fine while the app continues to fully launch via the now familiar zoom-in animation. On top of all this, users closing an app via the Home button or a vertical swipe can swipe through Springboard even as the app continues to close.

All of this helps iOS 12 feel just that little bit more slick than iOS 11 and actually takes us back to the pre-iOS 7 days when similar things could be achieved.

Again, these changes are not going to make huge differences to how we use our iPhones and iPads, but when you add them to the other little changes it all adds up to making iOS 12 one of the best, certainly most fluid releases in many a year. You can check out the gestures in action in the video below.

Amazing, isn’t it?

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