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Splash screens == sloth

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Re: Splash screens == sloth

#211

Post by jiggy2011 »

MikeCapone wrote: post #70

"Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster." My experience in OS X is that Photoshop has to be restarted very frequently or it just eats up more and more memory until it uses it all. Seems like bad memory management.

That's possibly just because there is no other contention for the memory. By and large it is the OS that is broadly responsible for memory management, the OS hands out pages of memory to programs and it's upto the programs as to how they use them.

If you have photoshop running and using a lot of RAM it is likely that were you to run another application the RAM usage of photoshop would drop to accommodate the other program as the OS will simply drop some of photoshop's pages and let the other program use them.

There is not really any performance hit from doing this since any page that is not "dirty" (i.e has not been written to) which will be basically any pages containing program code does not need to be swapped back to disk.

If you are concerned you should find a way to measure the quantity of IO going on in the swap area since heavy swap IO will be the best indicator that you either need more memory or something is not as it should be.

For example I run a server that is often at 70% or so of RAM usage but has only swapped something like 10MB of data in the last month.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#212

Post by cageface »

Maro wrote: post #11

This weekend the 3G mysteriously stopped working on my iPhone, so after months of use, I rebooted it. Rebooting the iPhone takes 1+ minute, and there _is_ a kind of splash screen shown during that time. The reason it appears instantenous during normal use is that it doesn't actually boot or load, it just turns the display back on. Also, many iOS apps actually have splash screens, you just don't see them very often as…

Adobe stuff is bloatware and sucks.

No, it's just vastly more complicated than most of the cut-down alternatives because it has to meet the needs of pro designers. Maybe there's some accumulated cruft there but I can guarantee you that Pixelmator, for example, would be similarly large if it had to support all the same use cases.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#213

Post by keypusher »

pak wrote: post #205
jiggy2011 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Tran…

I'm not sure even transactional NTFS would protect you in this case. From the wiki link:

Transactional NTFS is implemented on top of the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM), which is a Windows kernel component.

Because this is implemented on top of the kernel itself, if you have brought down the kernel in order to update files within said kernel, you likely are not going to be able to leverage the transactional rollback. You might able to do a system restore, if you boot from CD, but breaking your kernel is not an easily recoverable situation. I suspect there are actually safegaurds in the update procedure which protect against this situation, but things can go wrong and it is really not something you want to have to rely on.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#214

Post by jiggy2011 »

shocks wrote: post #116

This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life, where you have 16 milliseconds to do everything and it pays to be smart, use clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry (he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company producing software for the film industry. It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long ti…

My experience with games software is that it typically has much longer loading times than other software.

I think this is justified though because what matters in a game is the perceived performance while the game is actually in operation.

If when I load a game it spends an extra 10 seconds optimising quadtrees & shaders etc to give me faster game performance and enable 16 millisecond latencies then it is overall worth doing, since trying to load stuff off the disk while I am actually playing would harm the experience.

I imagine photoshop developers do something similar.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#215

Post by MichaelApproved »

untog wrote: post #24
munin wrote: post #4

>When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer. what phone does he use? every phone that I know of takes at least two minutes to come up from a cold start, and has for the last ten years...

Yeah, he's comparing two entirely different things. The phone is instant when turning the display on. My laptop is near-instant when resuming from sleep. Neither are instant at actually booting up.

And the phone is working off a fast flash drive while the PC is using a slow mechanical drive.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#216

Post by jiggy2011 »

pslam wrote: post #157
diggum wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading any necessary libraries. 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 ne…

> Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading any necessary libraries. How is that useful to a user? How many users even know what a "library" is? It might as well have a status bar announcing "Doing TECH thing 1 of 50...." It seems to me that a splash screen is just a diversion: showing the user just how much…

A progress bar at least let's you know that the software hasn't crashed or got stuck in an infinite loop.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#217

Post by jiggy2011 »

peteboyd wrote: post #111

The video game industry has the same issue. Initial bloat screens. A lot. Skyrim for instance, it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to load the initial screen, which is just the logo of Bethesda. You know what is on the initial screen. A button for me to click that says Start. Once I click that button, then I have to hit Continue for it to load the last save point. Then another 30 seconds to 1 minute to load my game/map…

I imagine much of the stuff in the initial 30 seconds is necessary overhead that you would incur anyway.

I prefer that a game does automatically load the last save point since it is less effort to simply click "continue" than it is to wait for something to load which I may not even want to do.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#218

Post by systemtrigger »

cageface wrote: post #212
Maro wrote: post #11

This weekend the 3G mysteriously stopped working on my iPhone, so after months of use, I rebooted it. Rebooting the iPhone takes 1+ minute, and there _is_ a kind of splash screen shown during that time. The reason it appears instantenous during normal use is that it doesn't actually boot or load, it just turns the display back on. Also, many iOS apps actually have splash screens, you just don't see them very often as…

Adobe stuff is bloatware and sucks. No, it's just vastly more complicated than most of the cut-down alternatives because it has to meet the needs of pro designers. Maybe there's some accumulated cruft there but I can guarantee you that Pixelmator, for example, would be similarly large if it had to support all the same use cases.

Yes though I suspect Photoshop's load time could be significantly reduced by limiting the features available at load time. If the method code for the 223rd most popular effect is loaded into memory prior to the user being able to do anything, Adobe is doing it wrong.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#219

Post by jiggy2011 »

easterisle wrote: post #169

Many people here are talking about how iOS works vs a desktop OS and that's the big difference - but its not about the SSD. If you have a high powered computer then its no problem to leave the adobe suite running and then just grab it from the task bar and get to work. The issue is that most people don't have high powered computers, at least powerful enough to run photoshop constantly while doing other things (HD vid…

I would say that overall modern versions of photoshop do feel faster than older ones.

Of course photoshop is intended for professional designers with reasonably high end computers, it was never intended for the use case of somebody using a netbook to touch up a few photos as there are other programs for that.

As technology has improved people will expect more from designers so they need more powerful tools optimised for working with large file sizes etc so Adobe are going to expend more effort maximising performance on higher end modern workstations then they are making sure it loads quickly on a five year old netbook.

Just because every teenager wants to use pirate CS4 to tack together a logo for their band does not mean that is what adobe should optimise for.

Re: Splash screens == sloth

#220

Post by jiggy2011 »

talmand wrote: post #151
motoford wrote: post #18

Don't you think it's odd he is complaining about splash screens when Adobe is responsible for the worst thing to ever happen to the web -- those stupid flash intros ? Talk about a waste of time, you had to wait for the time waster to load and then wait for it to play

Flash intros are the fault of the people who made them, not the software used to create them. When HTML5 canvas replaces Flash for such things will you then blame HTML5?

True, although from what I remember the flash development tools seemed to provide much functionality that seemed to be aimed specifically at creating things like this.

IIRC there was something that was basically a "flash intro wizard" however this may well have just been added due to demand from developers for such features.

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