781–786 of 786 posts
Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.
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OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. The…
The most annoying part of progress bars is the fact that programs so often use multiple bars. What's the point of watching a bar slowly reach 100%, only for it to be replaced with another progress bar that starts from 0 again?
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He's not talking about the cursor. He's talking about a circular loading animation. Like the one that replaces the submit button when you're making a post on Twitter/Facebook.
I'm talking exactly about that spinner. It's a lie. You quickly learn it has no relation whatsoever to what's happening in the background. And indeed it doesn't, because it's an animated GIF, completely detached from any logic or networking code! (Compare the CLI spinner/fan - that "/ - \ |" animation used to indicate progress. There you know that each tick of the spinner means work has been done, because it has to b…
The spinner appears when a request is made. It disappears when the request is resolved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm talking exactly about that spinner. It's a lie. You quickly learn it has no relation whatsoever to what's happening in the background. And indeed it doesn't, because it's an animated GIF, completely detached from any logic or networking code! (Compare the CLI spinner/fan - that "/ - \ |" animation used to indicate progress. There you know that each tick of the spinner means work has been done, because it has to b…
That's not true at all. In the websites I and many others build, that loading spinner is linked directly to network code. The spinner appears when a request is made. It disappears when the request is resolved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true at all. In the websites I and many others build, that loading spinner is linked directly to network code. The spinner appears when a request is made. It disappears when the request is resolved.
I was talking about animation. Show/hide on request made/resolved gives only binary information about starting and finishing something. But the spinning animation itself does not represent any operations being executed. It may very well be that the request failed and a bug in JS made it not remove the spinner. You end up with a forever-looping animation of "work", even though no work is being done. This makes the spi…