Splash screens == sloth

Their interface is the same. Are you utterly blind? Stop looking at the UX as a programmer and imagining the complexity of the features. The actual screen is displaying exactly the same stuff. There's a big white box to draw in and bunch of buttons to press.

You do not need to initalize all the 3rd party tools, you just have to find out which tiny little icon to add on a task bar or extra menu items to add, and why didn't you cache that when the extension was first detected?

And how silly of me, of course all the corporations these days let you turn off the updates on their computers don't they?

Stop telling your users that 'if they just..', do the opposite with UI than you do with your code, start programming for the best case scenario, not the worst case.

That's an example that proves the opposite of your point.

You may notice if you watch some older movies (pre-1950s, mostly) that they used to run the ENTIRE credits list at the start of the film. The WHOLE THING. Not just the credits you see at the beginning today, but also all the ones that today are listed at the END of the movie, too. The copyright notices for all the songs they used, the logos for their camera and film providers, the names of all the gaffers and best boys and Assistants To Mr. Bigshot... you had to sit through them all before the movie got underway.

They don't do that anymore. Today only a very small number of Very Important People get credited before the start of the movie. Everyone else gets shunted to the end. Why? The answer is TV. When TV came along and movies started getting shown there, they no longer had a captive audience. The audience could now change the channel if they weren't being entertained -- which meant that there was pressure on the filmmakers to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE. So they moved nearly all the credits to run after the film, rather than before.

That was a bit of a blow to all those other folks, of course, since credits at the end of a movie are credits nobody reads -- they're too busy leaving the theater or changing the channel. But it was necessary to conform to the audience's desire that they GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE.

Which is Thomas' point: users' expectations are changing. Used to be that it didn't matter that much if your app was slow to load, because users didn't expect it to be fast. But the proliferation of mobile devices and lightweight apps is changing those expectations. So if you care about your users and want to hold on to them, it behooves you to GET ON WITH THE DAMN APPLICATION.

Agreed. Though it would be really cool is Photoshop could somehow do progressive loading, so you can get the main UI + core functions up and running, and then bring all the plugins on in the background. Let the user choose their load order (I don't think this is too much to ask for a serious piece of software), and voila. For example, the 3D engine in the newer Photoshops. I never use it (it just doesn't overlap with my work). Would be nice if I could mitigate its effect on load time.

I wish I could just get more RAM, but some of us are still somewhat budget limited. Photoshop took enough of my money the first time around.

Most modern games use various tricks to minimize or eliminate loading screens, with varying degrees of success. Common ideas include using low-quality assets for far-away objects, dynamically replacing them when the player gets closer; creating assets that can easily be reused; and making the player wait in a small room or hallway while the next area loads. Sometimes this can backfire, as with the infamously slow elevators in Mass Effect, which are timed to always take as long as the worst-case load time for the area they're linked to.

TV Tropes has a list of examples: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicLoading

Another point is file size. Is it really necessary, that every version is twice as big (just estimating...) as its predecessor?

At least for many websites this trend has been stopped, due to mobile requirements.