Reminds me when i was a kid and was writing some GUI shell like Windows 3.1 (it only looked like it, of course, it was really just DOS programs :-P). I used a 386 and WfW 3.11 and Windows took a long time to run. Mine launched instantly and it felt "cheap". So to make it look more serious i added a loop that created and deleted files with small random delays inbetween and a progress bar that filled :-P. This way i got both a progress bar and a slower startup with hard disk noises like the serious programs had :-) (FWIW I remember adding the random delays because if you had smartdrv with write caching it would just flyby but also because a smooth progress bar felt fake :-P).
Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
141–150 of 200 posts
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#142Two mobile devices I worked on, at different companies, ended up with fake progress bars for boot-up. We engineers wanted individual bar segments for kernel load, filesystem mount, daemon startup and so on -- but wiring up the necessary instrumentation to the GUI would have been significant work, and management wasn't going to allow anything less than a show-stopper bug to delay code freeze. So in the real world, tim…
Just show me the console log...
Change the font, write it sideways in a frame, viola - progress bar!
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. It's also one of the irritating things about "Material Design" websites, where responses to clicks are artificially delayed before speeding out with unnatural acceleration. "Nothing is happening. JUST KIDDING!" I'm not sure if that is to mask the slowness of mo…
That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. Web browsers have progress bars. I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
I solved this in a react app I’m working on by overriding XMLHttpRequest.prototype.open to listen for the request lifecycle events and update a global “percent loaded” used to render a progress bar at the top of the page.
It’s far from perfect but is at least a good enough heuristic for the user to know when the page is loading a request.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#144Reminds me when i was a kid and was writing some GUI shell like Windows 3.1 (it only looked like it, of course, it was really just DOS programs :-P). I used a 386 and WfW 3.11 and Windows took a long time to run. Mine launched instantly and it felt "cheap". So to make it look more serious i added a loop that created and deleted files with small random delays inbetween and a progress bar that filled :-P. This way i go…
Cool story. I had a similar experience as a kid, when I designed the most elaborate splash screen only to notice it was shown only for a split second before the main window came up.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#145One of my sites has a whole fake interstitial page, people love it
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#146I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense. The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work. The users were delighted with the improvement.
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Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#147A related annoying thing is the spread of uncalibrated progress bars, that move front to back, then again loop around, giving no visual feed back of the quantum of time yet remaining.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am reminded of a webcomic, that i fail to locate at this moment, that reminded me of the practice of placing something next to a progress bar, like say during a Windows 95 install, to check if anything is actually happening.
This is the comic you're thinking of. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-so... This was one of the comics that convinced me to add them to my RSS feed. I have not been disappointed since.
That's so brilliant because it was true. (Nailed it, pixel perfect)
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ages ago I evaluated some reporting software. We were using Crystal Reports at the time. One thing that CR did better than the others was make pages available as they were generated. This made the software feel faster even though it was slower than one or two of the others[0] at the time. [0] Can't remember which ones exactly.
Just had a little PTSD flashback moment there at seeing the words "Crystal Reports"
Oh dear. That garbage came with Cold Fusion (before it became ColdFusion), IIRC.
Re: Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)
#150I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense. The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work. The users were delighted with the improvement.
Ages ago I evaluated some reporting software. We were using Crystal Reports at the time. One thing that CR did better than the others was make pages available as they were generated. This made the software feel faster even though it was slower than one or two of the others[0] at the time. [0] Can't remember which ones exactly.
For interactive applications, reponsiveness trumps raw throughput. It's what made operating systems like AmigaOS and BeOS so fast: they didn't actually crunch numbers faster, but they always stayed responsive and quickly reacted to user input under any load, that made them feel faster.