Conversation

Our existing 'screen-to-screen' transitions are built in an 'image-to-image' kind of way. For certain types of transitions this has a few fidelity downsides (e.g. status and tab bars are duplicated during the transition and objects can't be animated independently).

With the new setting enabled, the transitions are objectively better. They keep the right things fixed and allow you to, with very little duplication, create quite complex transitions were some objects animate separately. But why is it not the default setting?

Our existing screen transitions *always* work, completely independent of your document's structure. This is a huge upside if you want to explore an idea as quickly as possible. We didn't want to lose this at all since it would mean to slow you down when you want it the least.

So the biggest issue with the new option is that it's a lot more complex than previous transitions since it depends on the document's structure (layer naming and hierarchy).

We already decided to do a few changes to how objects are automatically named on creation or duplication. The goal was to make Smart Animate work in most cases out of the box. But no system is perfect.

Since there are many different ways in which you can edit the document, it is quite impossible to prevent objects to match up incorrectly from the user's perspective. So we knew that there will be situations, where you hit the play button and things are wrong. This sucks.

We knew these cases are inevitable. But instead of leaving you hanging, we wanted to support you in fixing the situation, essentially *debugging* your document.