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Splash screens == sloth

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Re: Splash screens == sloth

#101

Post by mikeash »

efa wrote: post #89
rauljara wrote: post #28

Louis CK has a fantastic rant about people complaining about technology being too slow (and technology, in general). It helped to put my own rage in perspective. I find myself getting less pissed at technology since watching it, and I kind of hope that lasts. (NSFW) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=relat...

That was my first thought. Or people complaining about air travel - "when they are in a chair flying 500 mph 7 miles up!" I find it hard to get worked up about a program that you are going to use for the next 8 hours taking 30 seconds to start. Though I do get annoyed waiting for STS (SpringSource's Eclipse) to start up. One thing that would be very helpful for these plugin based program would be for them to be confi…

It only makes sense to complain about any gap between potential and actual performance, though, because that's how things progress.

It's pretty amazing to fly across the country with only ~8 hours of time spent in transit. However, just because that's amazing doesn't make it wrong to complain about one of those hours being spent on completely unnecessary security theater. It could easily be 7 instead of 8, and that's an hour that everybody's wasting. Yes, 8 is still amazing, but 7 would be better.

Same thing with software. It's amazing that we can do this stuff at all, let alone as quickly as we do. Being able to start something as powerful as Photoshop in an hour would still be fantastic. But when the capability exists to make it start in five seconds instead, it's still reasonable to complain about the gap.

To look at it another way, when you're waiting around because necessary work is being done, that's reasonable. But when you're waiting around for the sole reason that somebody decided his time is more important than your time, that's rightly frustrating.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#102

Post by Too »

They could at least display "tip of the day" or hotkeys while you are waiting to make the waiting time at least a bit productive. Why don't programs have this today? Most old programs had this but after starting up. Displaying it while the program is loading would be much smarter.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#103

Post by Lockyy »

What I find interesting is a story about Firefox Mobile. It used to get complaints about it being slow to load and that it needed to be sped up. The solution to this was that during load the browser would display an image of the browser as it is when loaded instead of just a black screen as it previously had. Complaints about slow loading screens decreased dramatically. So yeah, I'll be keeping this sort of thing in mind. This was all relayed to me from someone who attended the Firefox Mobile talk at FOSDEM.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#104

Post by J3L2404 »

zoul wrote: post #39
ssharp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Pixelmator is a good replacement for Fireworks? Fireworks has been really great at allowing me to quickly mock-up different web layout concepts without having to write any HTML code. I know some are in the "concept with HTML camp", but I've found Fireworks to be so much faster. I've never bothered too much with Photoshop since Fireworks did 90% of what I wanted. I'm like many, however, in grumbling about…

I have moved from webdesign so that I no longer need the design features I admired on Fireworks. What I liked most about Fireworks was the blend between the vector and bitmap graphics, and I don’t think that Pixelmator is getting anywhere close to that. But it’s worth to take a look. Also try out Acorn ( http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/ ). I think both have a free evaluation.

Seconded for Acorn. A really solid program.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#105

Post by smacktoward »

Splines wrote: post #86
smacktoward wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Thanks for sharing that, I learned something new today already :). You can see the progression even over the last 10-20 years. We used to see the title of the movie, and then a few minutes of scenery with the actor's names on them. These days it's not uncommon for the movie to start almost immediately with the credits integrated into various background elements.

Yeah, as audiences' attention spans get ever shorter the pressure to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE gets ever higher, so filmmakers are always looking for ways to pare down the length of the opening credits or to present them in a way that also starts the story moving.

The same evolution has been underway for a couple of decades now with TV shows. Until the early 1990s it was commonplace for TV sitcoms to have a full opening credits reel, complete with a theme song just for that show. Think of the opening of Mary Tyler Moore [1] from back in the '70s, for instance, or Cheers [2] from the '80s; they both became iconic representations of those shows.

These intros helped set the tone of the show that followed them. But they generally took a full minute to run, and as the universe of options provided by cable expanded and remote controls became inexpensive, waiting that extra minute for the show to start began to turn off viewers. The push began to GET ON WITH THE DAMN SHOW, and so the traditional musical opening first shrank, then disappeared altogether. Today's openings run much shorter -- 25 seconds max -- and usually include just a couple of title cards and a musical snippet.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m4-Te1m7fY

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8ljNobUys

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#106

Post by codesuela »

when I read this I instantaneously thought about this rant from Louis CK [Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Linux Mint and Windows 7 take 10 seconds to boot on my laptop with a SSD. That's amazing. Just a few months ago I would go make a sandwich while my PC would boot. If you have a problem with splash screens alt tab to the browser of your choice. If you think your PC boots to slow take out your smartphone and play with it. This is not to say developers should be wasteful with users time. Especially web developers know how import page speed is. But it's a complex program just give it a few SECONDS.

Also one should mention Steam (the game distribution platform). If you are bored in between rounds you just bring up the steam panel and use the embedded browser to browse the web or chat with friends. But those at times minute long delays. Sure you could embed a email client in the OS the comes up long before the main GUI is loaded but you wont get to read much in 10 seconds.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#107

Post by JBiserkov »

mattmanser wrote: post #47
JS_startup wrote: post #25

I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy. His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it…

Think of the 100s of millions or even billions of hours of unhappiness caused by whatever utter wanker designed the windows update system. All that misery waiting to go home to your actual life but you can't because your laptop's displaying 'Do not turn off or unplug your computer'. No, just sit here and watch me. Or those times you accidentally opened Word or Photoshop or MySql Workbench (god that's slow) or whateve…

> You made a mistake? Well fuck you. I'm not listening to you, says your computer, I'm just going to ignore you for a little bit.

The programs from Office 2010 have a _x on the splash screen which lets you easily minimize/kill the program in question. It's really snappy, works like a charm.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#108

Post by darrikmazey »

While as a programmer I understand that perhaps this load time could be improved, and maybe splash screens are a lazy solution, but I wonder if it warrants this level of anger. Even assuming a generous 5 minute load time on photoshop (I don't know as I don't use it, but I doubt it's that much), and that you reload twice a day (once at the beginning of the day and maybe once after lunch), and you use it every weekday of the year, that's still less than 0.5% of your year.

I'm not saying losing 43 hours of your life per year is insignificant, but a proportional response seems appropriate. You in all likelihood spend more time waiting at red lights.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#109

Post by viraptor »

darwinGod wrote: post #66
JS_startup wrote: post #25

I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy. His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it…

Agree.I wouldn't care if MS Office,Photoshop takes some extra time to start.The wait would be worth it.For all the bashing Microsoft gets,MS Office and Active Directory are products which really,really way better when compared to their open source counterparts.So,let the engineers have their 30 seconds of glory! :-)

AD has pretty much no serious replacement, but MSO is for me as bad as everything else out there. Office in general constantly crashes and the only thing that is reasonable in Outlook is the calendar integration. It's so bad, that in 2007 it still didn't have a good threading view of messages. Communicator is a joke where you can't even do local list search - you either have to query global company address list, or manually scroll through your contacts...

In general no - I can't agree they're "really, really way better" than OS replacements. They're better for some people, worse for others.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#110

Post by tambourine_man »

In all fairness, Photoshop startup time did get a lot faster at version 10 (CS3), when they changed the type system to load only when needed.

But yes, there is still a long way to go. I don't think we need iOS like hacks such as showing a PNG of the GUI to trick you into thinking loading is done. This solution has its own set of issues (responsiveness, not precisely matching your previous state in case of crash, etc). It's x1000 faster than my phone, we can do better.

Modularizing, as shown above, is hard, but probably the best way to go. As programs grown to the size of a small OS, they should be treated as such.

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