161–170 of 246 posts
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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.
If you don't have any windows open in the app, doesn't Lion quit it for you?
I ranted about this a few days ago. My favorite idiocy on Windows is their background "optimization" of .Net binaries. https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412... This service appears to perform a large number of I/O requests (probably reading/writing a large number of small files). It will totally consume the disk seek capacity, massively slowing down every other program that is also doing disk I…
But the situation you describe should only happen once for each time you install or update what is a relatively major component of the OS.
But the point is that with just a bit more attention to detail, they could have made this process utterly unobtrusive: don't process more than once file per second, if you want want to build in heuristics to infer the disk seek bandwidth.
Btw, Microsoft Security Essentials may be doing things like this. For me, it is totally not noticeable.
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…
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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…
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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…
That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. But it seems sometimes people like to ignore that fact. The key is finding what works best for the particular application at hand. Personally, for something like Photoshop I'd rather have the long upfront load as opposed to hitches when loading a feature on demand. Which, out of curiosity I timed it, t…
Everybody seems to be missing the third way: load in the background as the user can already work.
Take those fonts, you could spend 5s loading them during the splashscreen making the user wait, you could spend 5s loading them when first requested making the user wait again. Or you could load them after the program has started, in the background.
Will the user go from "empty document" to opening the fonts dropdown in under 5s? Pretty damn unlikely, and if he does he'll wait for the remainder of the load. In either case, he just "won" 5s.
Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10 second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants 2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.
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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.
You could just close it from the dock you know. Or switch to it and command-Q immediately.
In fact, I don't even understand how you'd go around to "reopening a window" of preview, preview will not open any window without a document in it, do you open a document just to close preview or something?
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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 d…
> 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. Seriously? I mean, my Dodge Neon has the same gas, brake, clutch and steering wheel that a Ferrari 599 has, why doesn't it 0-60 as fast? Stop comparing engine size and complexity, it has all the superficial elements of a spor…
Has photoshop gotten faster in our lifetimes? No! It just wants more and more resources with every release. So what is the difference between how apps behave on iOS and how they behave on the desktop? Backgrounding. Very very few apps (ableton live is one that has some "freeze" type features) don't have any way for you to shut down portions of the app or put the app to sleep so that you can start it up quickly. On iOS this is how apps are expected to behave, and it shows.
But, even if Apple did bring backgrounding to the desktop, I imagine Adobe would be one of the last to support it - and I only say this because of my previous personal experience with Adobe products like Flex, LCCS, etc…
I just thank code I'm not a designer...
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…
The Adobe apps still do have more significant load times, more like 5-8ish seconds, but RAM is cheap, just load that app once and keep it open forever. Hibernate your system instead of shutting it down cold so that the apps don't have to reload from initial state when you next use them. This also makes Windows pop up very quickly (but even from cold boot modern Windows only takes like 15-ish seconds on my (again 4 year old) system), which isn't anything to complain about compared to any other desktop OS out there.
All in all, I'm in the group of people very confused about this post. I'm historically someone who absolutely hated long load times, but it isn't something I've worried about for any app or OS I use in years now.