3 ms·

Huh... loading bars do not have to move evenly and smoothly. You reduce all your loading activity to a checklist, scale that to 100%, and update the progress ba

by tomc1985 5y ago

Huh... loading bars do not have to move evenly and smoothly. You reduce all your loading activity to a checklist, scale that to 100%, and update the progress bar with the number of checklists completed as soon as you are able The bars themselves only have a couple of important fields... total items and items completed. I'm not understanding all this other complexity you are specifying

remus 5y ago
If you're just counting 'x of y things done' is that really a helpful measure of progress? Say the first 100 items on the list take 1ms except for the last item which takes 30s. your progress bar will be stuck at basically complete waiting for the last item to complete which doesn't feel like you're really communicating anything useful about progress.
- nacs 5y ago
  It would be for me. Anything is better than a fake progress bar that turns into a static image as though it's frozen.
- sortskur 5y ago
  Depends on how you think of progress; as a function of total time or a function of total amount of elements on 'checklist'
- xg15 5y ago
  It actually is, as with some time, you learn which phases take what amounts of time in a normal situation. This lets you judge pretty quickly how long loading should take - or if something goes wrong. > Say the first 100 items on the list take 1ms except for the last item which takes 30s. Yes, in your worst-case scenario, this would be the case - but when would that scenario occur. If each state of the progress bar represents a different operation (as in the gmail scenario), you can structure the different states in such a wy that this doesn't happen. If different states represent different slices of same operation (e.g. copying files), it's not really likely that ine slice of the same operation always takes a disproportionate amount of time, compared to the other slices.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Progress bars measure progress, not time remaining. I don't understand all these other rules people have come up with about them, maybe we need to stop making it so complex

remus 5y ago

If you're just counting 'x of y things done' is that really a helpful measure of progress? Say the first 100 items on the list take 1ms except for the last item which takes 30s. your progress bar will be stuck at basically complete waiting for the last item to complete which doesn't feel like you're really communicating anything useful about progress.

nacs 5y ago
It would be for me. Anything is better than a fake progress bar that turns into a static image as though it's frozen.
sortskur 5y ago
Depends on how you think of progress; as a function of total time or a function of total amount of elements on 'checklist'
xg15 5y ago
It actually is, as with some time, you learn which phases take what amounts of time in a normal situation. This lets you judge pretty quickly how long loading should take - or if something goes wrong. > Say the first 100 items on the list take 1ms except for the last item which takes 30s. Yes, in your worst-case scenario, this would be the case - but when would that scenario occur. If each state of the progress bar represents a different operation (as in the gmail scenario), you can structure the different states in such a wy that this doesn't happen. If different states represent different slices of same operation (e.g. copying files), it's not really likely that ine slice of the same operation always takes a disproportionate amount of time, compared to the other slices.
tomc1985 5y ago
Progress bars measure progress, not time remaining. I don't understand all these other rules people have come up with about them, maybe we need to stop making it so complex