Accurate progress bars and “remaining time” displays (yes, I know that this isn’t technically possible, but we’re wishing here).
I don’t want to see my computer/phone grind away for a few minutes yet still be at “0%”, then jump to “76%”, chug away some more, then abruptly finish a task. When something is going to take time, I wanna know if we’re talking “stare at the screen for a minute” kind of time or “find something else to do for a while” kind of time.
I just want to do a humble brag here and say that there are some programmers that care.
30 years ago when I used to make multimedia training software, I would run an installer with another script running that would time stamp completion of the different install steps.
I would average them out and using the equivalent of a player piano, “playback” the progress bar on the end-user install.
So instead of reporting that a certain percentage was done which didn’t actually represent the time, you got an extremely accurate progress bar that on almost every computer, went up at a very predictable rate.
It’s a grotesquely easy thing to do and I don’t know why it hasn’t become common practice.
Like you said, as developers, there’s often nothing we can do about this. The state prior to something taking forever can be exactly the same as the state prior to it finishing quickly, so there’s no way for us to predict it.
Accurate progress bars and “remaining time” displays (yes, I know that this isn’t technically possible, but we’re wishing here).
I don’t want to see my computer/phone grind away for a few minutes yet still be at “0%”, then jump to “76%”, chug away some more, then abruptly finish a task. When something is going to take time, I wanna know if we’re talking “stare at the screen for a minute” kind of time or “find something else to do for a while” kind of time.
I just want to do a humble brag here and say that there are some programmers that care.
30 years ago when I used to make multimedia training software, I would run an installer with another script running that would time stamp completion of the different install steps.
I would average them out and using the equivalent of a player piano, “playback” the progress bar on the end-user install.
So instead of reporting that a certain percentage was done which didn’t actually represent the time, you got an extremely accurate progress bar that on almost every computer, went up at a very predictable rate.
It’s a grotesquely easy thing to do and I don’t know why it hasn’t become common practice.
Like you said, as developers, there’s often nothing we can do about this. The state prior to something taking forever can be exactly the same as the state prior to it finishing quickly, so there’s no way for us to predict it.
The best we can do is give you a throbber.
That’s better than nothing! At least I know my computer isn’t frozen.