4 ms·

I remember Internet Explorer also doing this back in the day. When I was a kid I assumed it was showing correct progress, and I'd be patiently waiting for no pa

I remember Internet Explorer also doing this back in the day. When I was a kid I assumed it was showing correct progress, and I'd be patiently waiting for no payoff. Only much later I learned it meant nothing, it was just showing it wasn't dead. I'm not sure about GMail's case, but I recall Mac OS X (back when it was called that) used to do something like this. Since showing a correct progress bar doesn't make it look so nice (it might be stuck at 90% for longer than it took to get there) and might be difficult to estimate, they instead wrote the last boot time into a file and on the next boot would render a smooth progress bar that would follow the timer. In my experience it made for a reasonable estimation of the boot time and I thought it was a clever solution.

drawqrtz 5y ago
What a clever solution! I like it because it still f gives an realistic indication of how long it will take!
- editkid 5y ago
  Yeah, that's clever indeed.
jgtrosh 5y ago
Jenkins also does that (estimate progress based on last duration), but also shows estimated status equal to the previous one. If you know what it means, you know what state you're trying to fix or maintain, but it is quite confusing at first.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? And how all the k001 k1dz had lots and lots of extensions? Well there was actually a special extension that made you even k001er: you could paste as many and whatever icons you desired into its resource fork, and it would plop them down one by one during the boot, delaying a bit between each. Sure it took a little longer to boot, but it made you such a bad-ass!
- Gualdrapo 5y ago
  > Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? Iirc Haiku does that in its splash screen. KDE sort of did at some point in KDE 4.x.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    > KDE sort of did at some point in KDE 4.x. I would swear it was KDE 3.x in its splash screen. https://cdn.pling.com/img//hive/content-pre1/14801-1.png https://cdn.pling.com/img//hive/content-pre1/14801-1.png The icons at the bottom would start in grey scale and be colored as KDE was loading.
    - Kwpolska 5y ago
      KDE 4 also used this style of splash screen (with the icons fading into view): https://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/kde4-splash1.jpg https://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/kde4-sp...
      - darkwater 5y ago
        Yeah, now I remember, I removed KDE 4 and its clocks [1] from my memory (it actually made me switch to Gnome and never went back) [1] basically the initial 4.0 release (which was a rewrite from scratch for the UI/Desktop component) was not usable at all as a daily driver, lots of crashes and missing features. The only thing that worked well from the start were the clock widgets, and they were showcased a lot in screenshot. I think it even reached some kind of meme status by KDE 4.1. But I cannot find any blog post / rant from the time, my search-fu is not that good.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
iOS does this when loading/switching apps. It takes a snapshot of the app as it was when closed, and then when you are loading that app as it was when you closed it it just shows the screenshot until the app state is reloaded. The hope is that the app is fully loaded before you actually attempt to interact with what you see on the screen.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  I think Windows does the same between desktop-compositor crashes and restarts. (When it doesn't get to bad, as than you just get a back screen with the mouse cursor until the compositor isn't restarted). At least that was my perception as I used Win 10.

drawqrtz 5y ago

What a clever solution! I like it because it still f gives an realistic indication of how long it will take!

editkid 5y ago
Yeah, that's clever indeed.

jgtrosh 5y ago

Jenkins also does that (estimate progress based on last duration), but also shows estimated status equal to the previous one. If you know what it means, you know what state you're trying to fix or maintain, but it is quite confusing at first.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? And how all the k001 k1dz had lots and lots of extensions? Well there was actually a special extension that made you even k001er: you could paste as many and whatever icons you desired into its resource fork, and it would plop them down one by one during the boot, delaying a bit between each. Sure it took a little longer to boot, but it made you such a bad-ass!

Gualdrapo 5y ago
> Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? Iirc Haiku does that in its splash screen. KDE sort of did at some point in KDE 4.x.
- darkwater 5y ago
  > KDE sort of did at some point in KDE 4.x. I would swear it was KDE 3.x in its splash screen. https://cdn.pling.com/img//hive/content-pre1/14801-1.png https://cdn.pling.com/img//hive/content-pre1/14801-1.png The icons at the bottom would start in grey scale and be colored as KDE was loading.
  - Kwpolska 5y ago
    KDE 4 also used this style of splash screen (with the icons fading into view): https://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/kde4-splash1.jpg https://news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/kde4-sp...
    - darkwater 5y ago
      Yeah, now I remember, I removed KDE 4 and its clocks [1] from my memory (it actually made me switch to Gnome and never went back) [1] basically the initial 4.0 release (which was a rewrite from scratch for the UI/Desktop component) was not usable at all as a daily driver, lots of crashes and missing features. The only thing that worked well from the start were the clock widgets, and they were showcased a lot in screenshot. I think it even reached some kind of meme status by KDE 4.1. But I cannot find any blog post / rant from the time, my search-fu is not that good.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

iOS does this when loading/switching apps. It takes a snapshot of the app as it was when closed, and then when you are loading that app as it was when you closed it it just shows the screenshot until the app state is reloaded. The hope is that the app is fully loaded before you actually attempt to interact with what you see on the screen.

still_grokking 5y ago
I think Windows does the same between desktop-compositor crashes and restarts. (When it doesn't get to bad, as than you just get a back screen with the mouse cursor until the compositor isn't restarted). At least that was my perception as I used Win 10.