121–130 of 246 posts
Boo and/or hiss. If you hate splash screens, use simpler tools or get more RAM. When Photoshop finishes loading, it's ready to kick ass. The Finder, on the other hand, taunts with its almost-readiness. Faking readiness is far worse than setting and honoring expectations.
I agree, faking readiness is far worse to me than actually being ready.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this is sort-of the idea behind OSX behavior where an App is running with no open windows. They WANT you to leave everything running in the background. As a longtime Windows user, I still find this confusing, but I think they're trying to make everything appear to "load" instantly because it's just always running... sort of like on a phone.
+1. I find that extremely annoying. Some times I reopen a window of preview let's say just to close the whole program.
I do not understand what you are saying. Can you elaborate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wrong. Everytime I start Blender (3D content creation suite) I'm blown away by the time it takes to start. Less than 2 seconds! Ready to use! Do I call Blender a complicates program? Yes I do. The feature list can compete with the one of 3ds Max.
I think it's unfair for you to call him wrong, what's wrong with what he said in the context of what he was saying? I remember Blender loading fast as well. But are you sure every single feature of the program is available as soon as the GUI is displayed? Because I wouldn't be surprised if there's some lazy loading going on. Maybe some things finish loading in the background so they are not available right away or ma…
So I guess the launch was faster but waiting for the fonts to load was annoying when I was in the middle of working. During the app startup I'm probably spacing out for a few seconds while the app launches.
I see similar things in other apps. One that comes to mind at the moment is Eclipse where there are certain menu items when you drag over them the app freezes for a second. I always curse myself when I accidentally roll over one of those.
Particular parts of the app that require a lot of disk access may have a bit of a performance hit and so it makes sense to lazy load them, but it is a trade-off and sometimes I'd rather just wait a few moments at launch instead of getting killed by a thousand cuts while working.
OP has a point. Not a f*cing important point, but a point. UIs can and should be faster, Adobe and MS are slow to catch on with current user expectations, and splash screens are annoying relics of a bygone era of bloated desktop UIs. Agreed. But in the end, to me it's just one more instance of Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk I guess I just don't get the tone. Why th…
I'm also at Adobe and my team recently performed a ground-up re-write of our application. Minimizing start-up time was a high priority item and we did as much as we could to reduce it, but file importers/exporters, codecs, and some plug-ins need to be validated and loaded at some point - would you rather have these costs as one-time, up-front fees or scattered throughout the application as a thousand tiny cuts every time you open some menu command or function that requires these libraries?
But even so, professional desktop applications are not the same as lightweight mobile apps which tend to perform a limited set of tasks through a specific workflow. To compare the two is unfair and and bit clueless. And he brings up OS startup time, as if it doesn't take a LONG time for my Android or iOS devices to boot up - and they have less excuses as the hardware is pretty standard and fixed unlike my desktop machines.
I think his rant about wasted time is valid, but misguided. There's more time wasted navigating non-intuitive interfaces or poorly laid-out common controls. There a lot more time wasted when an application you rely on to do your job doesn't offer the functionality or freedom of workflow to accomplish what you need.
The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in 2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in 2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And I'm sure that the binaries for importing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, faking readiness is far worse to me than actually being ready.
That isn't the choice here, though. The choice is between throwing up a big nonfunctional promotional screen or a nonfunctional version of the actual app.
So... how much IS your time worth? How much extra would you be willing to pay for instantly-responsive applications? Programmer time isn't free, either.
The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in 2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in 2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And I'm sure that the binaries for importing…
[deleted]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's unfair for you to call him wrong, what's wrong with what he said in the context of what he was saying? I remember Blender loading fast as well. But are you sure every single feature of the program is available as soon as the GUI is displayed? Because I wouldn't be surprised if there's some lazy loading going on. Maybe some things finish loading in the background so they are not available right away or ma…
I remember one of the versions of PhotoShop (perhaps it was CS2) no longer loaded fonts at startup and the launch speed improved. But then the first time you select the font drop-down you had to wait around 5 seconds. So I guess the launch was faster but waiting for the fonts to load was annoying when I was in the middle of working. During the app startup I'm probably spacing out for a few seconds while the app launc…
Which, out of curiosity I timed it, the "long" loading time for Photoshop CS5 on my machine is less than six seconds. It think I can wait that long.