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Splash screens == sloth

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Re: Splash screens == sloth

#201

Post by jiggy2011 »

Zarel wrote: post #184
freehunter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think the engine metaphor is pretty apt. I completely understand what he's saying, but the alternative he seems to imply is no better. Why would I want the interface to load but not be able to use it for another 45 seconds? Okay, so I'm in my car (clicked on the shortcut) but I won't be able to go anywhere (use the application) for a few minutes because it's slow to accelerate (load). Who cares about the max sp…

I think it makes sense. To extend your metaphor, you can do things such as turn on the radio without noticing a performance difference between the two cars. The idea with Photoshop is, sure, loading the entire thing will take much longer, but users tend to use one tool at a time, and loading an individual tool shouldn't take anywhere near as long. It also makes sense from the point of view of parallelization. One exa…

When you run a program the OS will usually just map the code into address space, it won't necessarily actually load the code from the disk until it needs to.

It's possible that what the program is doing at initialization is not loading code from the disk but doing something else, like perhaps checking it has a nice big contiguous area of disk to use for temporary storage or for loading some type of cache into.

There are many times in programming where you make a choice between taking a one-off up front cost to optimise something for faster overall performance vs slower overall performance without the setup cost.

For example with a DBMS you can lose some write performance by having an index on a table and rebalancing when you are writing but the advantage is much faster read performance.

Also A Java program can take longer to run the first time by JIT compiling the program for the platform it is run on but this will mean faster performance of the program itself.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#202

Post by jiggy2011 »

masklinn wrote: post #165
talmand wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That is exactly the debate between loading upfront and loading on demand. Either way, you'll have to load resources. 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 aft…

Problem then is that as soon as I start using the program I might say want to load some data into it which is on the same drive as the program itself.

If I don't have an SSD my drive head is going to be spinning around like crazy trying to load resources from different parts of the disk at once which is going to give me slower overall performance. If you do have an SSD then it's likely fast enough either way.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#203

Post by jiggy2011 »

jarek-foksa wrote: post #200
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…

You don't write "enormously complicated programs" in the first place, you split big app into small pieces with as little coupling as possible to keep things simple.

Personally I agree and usually prefer more "unix like" applications like this. However from a support point of view there is value in everyone running the same consistent program rather than several hundred mini programs piped together in some way.

It also makes purchasing easier, for example you can just buy photoshop/illustrator/whatever and have all the features you need straight up rather than having to choose between programs for different actions (say one program for drawing vectors , another for applying filter effects, another for format conversion etc etc).

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#204

Post by jiggy2011 »

davedx wrote: post #136
alex_c wrote: post #128

A splash screen basically tells me, in very clear-cut terms, that my time is worth nothing whatsoever. It's a fresh reminder that users' needs don't count as much as programmer convenience does. 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.

Why should users have to pay extra?? The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$. The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity? There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.

Basecamp is a bit different, since the application itself is running mostly server-side so it is essentially already loaded. It's possible that the startup/init time of the actual RoR application on a server may take considerably longer.

With web applications the key to speed is more about writing efficient JS, having a good caching strategy and ensuring your server can handle many concurrent requests. A lot of these can be solved by the developers simply throwing more money at their server tech, when it comes to client-only applications you can't realistically buy all of your users new computers.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#205

Post by pak »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #199
keypusher wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they put that notification there to annoy you? No, it's because of possible data loss and/or system file corruption if you turn off the power while the system files are being patched. Splash screens exist because the program is loading. If you want the functionality of Paint, or Notepad, open those instead. If you want Photoshop, you open Photoshop, and it takes a while to load because it is gigantically co…

Surely Windows updates are applied via some sort of transactional system that can be rolled back and re-attempted if the process fails for whatever reason? Having a power cut during a Windows update shouldn't result in a completely trashed system.

Surprisingly, NTFS does allow for transactions [1] and this feature is implemented since Vista, while as far as I know, HFS+ on Macs has no comparable feature. Therefore what you say may in fact be true.

I'm curious if cutting the power on a Mac while it's moving files into place will break a software update, or if the whole package receipt mechanism prevents that from occurring.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#206

Post by jiggy2011 »

alex_c wrote: post #154
davedx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should users have to pay extra?? The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$. The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity? There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.

Someone has to pay. Whether it's a higher price for users, less time spent on other features, or lower profits for the company, the effort has to come from somewhere. I don't disagree that responsiveness and user experience are important, but Basecamp is a webapp. Responsiveness for the most common tasks is a higher priority than the one-time cost at start-up. I'm not sure anyone is "throwing away their userbase"...…

Every Photoshop equivalent program I've ever used (with the same level of functionality) takes at least the same amount of time to load. I'm pretty sure GIMP actually takes longer.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#207

Post by jiggy2011 »

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #187
davedx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should users have to pay extra?? The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$. The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity? There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.

Is waiting 5-10 seconds honestly "cutting into their productivity"? Even so, there's nothing else that could be done with their time while they wait beyond impotently staring and swearing at their computer? If that's how they operate then quite frankly they deserve to have "lost" that time.

The program that I use which takes the longest to load is eclipse , that takes around 10 seconds to load.

All I do when I switch my computer on in the morning is load up my mail client which opens pretty much instantly and then click the eclipse icon. By the time I've glanced at my mail to see if there's anything urgent that needs my immediate attention eclipse has already loaded.

I would say I lose exponentially more time to interruptions and distractions than I do waiting for my computer to load anything.

The only time my computer takes a really long time to do anything is when I have to copy down a large dataset from production to my workstation to debug some weird issue. This is going to take 10 minutes anyway so I just use the time to make coffee or something.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#208

Post by jiggy2011 »

oofoe wrote: post #196

A lot of people here seem to think that complaining about a five to six second start time is just whining. I believe you're wrong -- it is a legitimate and valid complaint and here's why: Most software can't run for very long. A lot of high-end software can be /very/ unstable (hello, Maya! ;-). The user is not just starting that software once at the beginning of the day for a long productive day of work, they are all…

If I was using some software and it was so unstable that I had to restart it over-and-over again I'd conclude that there was either something horribly wrong with my setup somewhere in which case I'd try and resolve it or that the software was simply a POS and I would stop using it.

I very rarely have program crashes these days and when I do it is usually down to either a failing hard disk or that I am using something version 0.x of something.

I do agree to an extent about Windows updates though , these do tend to nark me (especially the nag screens). Unless it's patching something that would allow privileged remote code execution onto my box right now it can wait.

Any company that was genuinely worried about their staff losing productivity due to slow program loads would just install SSDs onto all their computers, afterall this is what we at HN generally advocate.

What I find somewhat annoying though is software that has a lot of "visual effects" such as windows that fade in and out where you can't interact with the program until the effect has completed. This is only annoying though if it would have been instant if the effect was not there.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#209

Post by wmil »

powertower wrote: post #59
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…

Sounds to me like he's either temporarily enraged, or is trying to get fired. The spashscreen does 1 thing, it tells the user that the app is loading and you don't need to click the exe/icon again. His solution to a 5-10 second load time is to provide a fake UI, record phantom mouse clicks, and also give the user a game to play, only makes everything worse. Some apps have to initialize, and without that you are left…

Adobe has been laying people off, he could be trying to draw attention to himself in order to find a new job.

Anyways he's solving the wrong problem. What he really wants is to have the OS log him in, lock the screen, and load his common apps before he gets to work.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#210

Post by prtamil »

For One time if you see splash screen its not a problem. But for example if visual studio crashes so often and it makes you see to splash so often then as author mentioned i would feel like i would commit seppuku. They should try caching or something .
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