People were expecting the MIUI 12 will come soon. This week, Wang Teng, Product Director of Redmi, confirmed on Weibo that will happen in the short future.
In addition, Xiaomi has already opened the registration warm-up for the MIUI event. If calculated by time, MIUI 12 will be released at the end of April.
And before this, the MIUI development version of the internal test announcement said that the MIUI 11 internal test version officially stopped changing.
It seems that this year's MIUI 12, rice noodles do not have to wait until September, but can get a glimpse of the true content in the first half of the year.
High refresh rate "system-level support"
The biggest change in MIUI 12 is the global optimization of native support for high refresh rate screens.
At present, Xiaomi 10 series and Redmi K30 have been launched with a high refresh rate + high sampling rate, but MIUI's transition animation has not been specially optimized.
In the leaked screenshots, we see that Xiaomi is indeed trying to improve the high-refresh-rate transition animation. However, in order to save power, Xiaomi also gave a switch that the user can switch by selecting.
Why do you need to optimize the transition animation? This is about the problem of "non-linear animation". In fact, the apps and components we open need nonlinear animation to enhance the frustration of operating gestures.
The focus of Android's early days was not animation rendering, so there was no iOS eye-catching in UI animation.
After MIUI 6, Xiaomi also began to pay attention to the development of nonlinear animation and adopted non-linear animation in the background transition such as clearing the background.
In MIUI 9, Xiaomi began to consciously slow down the speed of opening the app, making the operation of opening the app as intuitive as piercing the bubble. In the era of the full screen, Android has adopted a large number of non-linear animations to match gesture operations.
However, with the popularity of high refresh rate screens this year, animations that were previously based on 60Hz refresh rates need to be changed. After all, the curve of nonlinear animation is not a complete S shape.
Like in the Swift UI, the animation parameters set by Apple for developers, you rarely see the animation of the rule change. Many of the animation parameters below are irregular changes, but basically follow the rule of "fast first and then slow".
In order to be able to improve the delicate experience of full screen + high score screen, Xiaomi chose to update the transition animation. Not only to improve the user experience of rice noodles, but also to establish a relatively complete interactive language.
"Rethink interaction" is the focus of MIUI design updates in recent years. For example, MIUI 11's main theme is "new sound and efficiency, innovation", and subtracts bloated design symbols.
In addition to the visual changes, Xiaomi has also changed quite a lot of dynamic sound effects due to the addition of linear motors. The sound + vibration method is more intuitive to tell users "what am I doing."
We also saw this in other news of MIUI 12. For example, Xiaomi will add a "navigation bar" directly below the iPhone, so that users can directly switch multitasking by touching the navigation bar, enhancing the card-based browsing of the Android background.
In addition to the comprehensively modified gestures, MIUI 12 will also revise the fonts. At present, Xiaomi is revising the status bar display fonts and the inconsistencies of the system, optimizing some digital fonts.
And for the current page, Xiaomi will also modify it.
And, Xiaomi is also enhancing the readability in dark mode. First, in dark mode, you can dim your wallpaper.
And on the black system interface, you can add a gray or blue border as the background color, switching options will become more intuitive.
In summary, Xiaomi still wants to strengthen its own design language in MIUI 12 and strive to achieve unified application and system vision.
Message aggregation
If Xiaomi's full-screen gesture optimization is based on hardware advancements, then changes are made. Then the transformation of the message flow is an important consideration of MIUI for today's software ecosystem.
According to the leaked information, MIUI 12 will set up a message center, which allows users to view all historical information. And this information is strictly arranged according to the time axis, rather than the classification of the previous applications.
In fact, the intrusion of too much information is a pain point for smartphone users today. Most of today's solutions are application drawers-that is, the applications themselves are used for division.
But this will cause the notification in the app to have no clear distinction between the information, and if multiple apps come together, it is still too messy.
For example, Apple changed the way notifications are displayed in iOS 12, from a list-style time display to the precise classification of each category.
But few apps will follow Apple 's classification, and it's common for weather and financial sections in an app to “mix broadcasts”, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of notifications.
The method adopted by Xiaomi is also a time list classification, but it is more intuitive than iOS: Xiaomi effectively displays information through waterfall flow, and also urges users to simplify the information flow in disguise. This should be one of the best processing methods at present, which is intuitive and does not have too much redundancy.
In the final analysis, however, the abuse of app notifications is the root of today's "notice excess".
Camera update
If you said the comprehensive screen gestures and message prompts introduced earlier, you can find clues in the internal testing center. Then Xiaomi's big action on the camera may be a surprise at the conference at the end of April.
MIUI 12 cameras will add a variety of features. The most important thing is the optimization of the camera UI. In the mode of dealing with multiple cameras, the current operating logic is too complicated and not very user-friendly. It is expected to be optimized in MIUI 12.
The focus of Xiaomi's promotion this year is undoubtedly the 108MP lens with hundreds of millions of pixels. Xiaomi intends to put the 108MP mode and AI portrait mode directly on the camera 's main page, which is more intuitive and convenient to switch.
More to come?
In fact, according to the current leaked information, Xiaomi will have more updates on MIUI 12 at the end of April. For example, the enhanced privacy model and the integration of health apps; of course, there is the legendary "ad optimization".
As the end of April approaches, Xiaomi seems to be in an orderly arrangement.
The MIUI 12 timetable appeared on the official Xiaomi community website. Although it was soon deleted, it can still be seen that MIUI 12 is still Android 10 in advance, and Android 11 was officially launched in September.
This, in turn, indicates that these current feature updates are only a side dish, and September is the top priority.
However, from the current functions, it can be seen that Xiaomi is currently pulling away from the complicated function overlay to do subtraction for users, which is also the general trend of mobile phone operating systems in the past two years.
The relative stagnation of hardware has accelerated the manufacturers' emphasis on operating system optimization, and it can also rethink the future development direction of mobile phones.
