begin quote On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:05:29 -0700 Nadyne Mielke <nmielke acm org> wrote: > At 05:28 PM 10/20/2004, Kirk Bridger wrote: > >I just wanted to mention that if we're looking at alternatives to the > >splash screen, I believe that a progress bar is better than an > >hourglass cursor. The progress bar shows PROGRESS, while the cursor > >just shows that the computer is busy doing something ... anything. > >The progress bar is more informative, and much easier to interpret > >and see. > > The guidelines for the commericial product on which I work say that an > > hourglass should be used if the delay is less than 2 seconds, and a > progress bar otherwise. Do note that this guideline is used in my > Real Job, which isn't currently in the open source world; IMHO, it's > a reasonable guideline anyway. YES! I -seriously- loathe the "change the mouse pointer to some animated hourglass while we wait for Epiphany/mozilla/evolution to get its act together on my slower work-machines. Its -horrid- since I have to wait for the complete loading across network (root on NFS) and the machine isn't very fast. (via C3, Realtek nic so almost everything is in software, straining the poor beast) Theese things appear strange, frustrating and confusing, since its a looong time where it just stands there, rolling its hourglass and waiting for something without anything else happening. The splashscreen is quite necessary in this case, and just the fact that OpenOffice takes almost as long to show its splashscreen as the time the splashscreen is visible shows that something is going wrong. Badly so, in how things are implemented there. Splashscreens, progressmeeters are -good- . preferrably with some identifying text, rather than an obscure icon. Even when you have a meter, the text is good since it tells you something of what is happening, rather than a dumb stop at 80% ... (why does it always stop there?) Fex, Kernel bootups with graphical interfaces. Another of those "things" where you show a cute progressbar and things just stop 30% through. nothing. Just standing there, making a user think its crashed (yes, if the progressmeter usually moves rapidly, and then stops for 30-60 seconds, the machine has hard-locked and has to be rebooted. ) in reality, the NIC wasn't plugged in and it was just waiting for DHCP to show up or time-out. An explaining line of text is a good thing in such cases. //Spider -- begin .signature Tortured users / Laughing in pain See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end
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