In a similar vein, there's this website: http://haspvsnpbeensolved.com/ Although; in this case; I'd hesitate to call this a strict example of 'benevolent deception'. ;)
Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
131–140 of 200 posts
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am reminded of a webcomic, that i fail to locate at this moment, that reminded me of the practice of placing something next to a progress bar, like say during a Windows 95 install, to check if anything is actually happening.
This is the comic you're thinking of. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-so... This was one of the comics that convinced me to add them to my RSS feed. I have not been disappointed since.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am reminded of a webcomic, that i fail to locate at this moment, that reminded me of the practice of placing something next to a progress bar, like say during a Windows 95 install, to check if anything is actually happening.
I do that whenever I have to wait on a progress bar. I zoom in with whatever accessibility options there are, then when a pixel is 3-5mm I put my mouse cursor at the end of the bar and wait.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#134Two mobile devices I worked on, at different companies, ended up with fake progress bars for boot-up. We engineers wanted individual bar segments for kernel load, filesystem mount, daemon startup and so on -- but wiring up the necessary instrumentation to the GUI would have been significant work, and management wasn't going to allow anything less than a show-stopper bug to delay code freeze. So in the real world, tim…
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#135"The security theater appeared to work." (referring to a fake progress bar in a game) That's not what security theater means.
This article was seriously one of the most depressing things I've ever read on HN.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#136Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visual confirmation that it isn't hung, I'd be happy too.
You're happy until 30 minutes later when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end, and you come to suspect that the only thing that didn't crash was the progress bar.
That, my friend, is an impressive command of the English language.
Thank you for teaching me the word asymptotically! [0]
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#138Reminds me of the old IE bar (not sure if it still does this), but it would crawl towards 100%, getting slower and slower as it approached the end, when waiting for a page to respond. In reality IE had no idea how much "progress" had been made by the server, if any.
Same as Explorer, the file browser. Once you know, it's useful as a timeout meter, i.e. it signals "how long before this device/network location is deemed unreadable".
Windows updates could use this, when it randomly decides to wait 30 minutes on startup despite not warning you and not giving a skip option.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. Web browsers have progress bars. I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
I don't know why every thread about Web applications needs someone to tell me that technically HTML was just designed to be a document format. OK, great, now it isn't just that.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. Web browsers have progress bars. I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
I don't know why every thread about Web applications needs someone to tell me that technically HTML was just designed to be a document format. OK, great, now it isn't just that.
If that isn’t the way we build sites now, either change the way we build sites or accept that it sucks. But this is Hacker News so we’re supposed to think about different ways to build sites than what we do now.