14 ms·

Splash screens == sloth

• techdog 15y ago
  I don't think the guy will lose his job. Do you? He is addressing a very real issue. Adobe should read this.
  • bartj3 15y ago
    Besides whether the issue he's addressing is real or not (i dont agree with him), this is not the way to address the company you work for and i would completely agree with Adobe if they do fire him for this.
    • talmand 15y ago
      I wouldn't fire him but I would ask that he be a little more informed on how modern technology works before going on a rant about it. Especially when he aims his complaints at his own company. There are REASONS for some programs to load slow, it's not like everyone is competing for the slowest loading software.
  • jsavimbi 15y ago
    > He is addressing a very real issue. He adressed nothing beyond his hate for the splash screen, which has seen its time imo, but nonetheless has nothing on many of the other features and tools that Adobe puts out when it comes to bloat. If Adobe really cared about the user, they don't because they own the brand name synonymous with image manipulation, they would at least make an attempt to tailor the application to the specific user's needs, not the user base as a whole. But they don't have to and will keep doing what they deem good for them until a real challenger appears. And then they'll buy them or sue them into oblivion.
    • jiggy2011 15y ago
      I'm not sure how they would "tailor the application to the specific user's needs" as it would be clearly impractical to develop different versions for each of their millions of customers. Photoshop (for example) is pretty extensible and has support for plugins as well as scripting capabilities etc, not sure what else you want? Also part of the reason that adobe is the industry standard is that their applications are consistant and a designer who hops jobs can easily get upto speed in a new environment without having to learn a completely new tool.
      • jsavimbi 15y ago
        > up to speed in a new environment are you assuming that every time a developer switches job, he or she has to learn a new IDE. Life isn't like that. It's not impractical to assume that a user will use a specific subset of all of the tool offerings and doesn't need or use all of what the application has to offer. The app should be able to develop a profile based on what the user actually does with it instead of forcing all of the functionality onto them. But Adobe makes a lot of money with their product, has no competitors of note and therefore doesn't have to change the way they do business because even if their subsequent releases fail to impress their user base, they're still going to sell licenses.
        • jiggy2011 15y ago
          The problem is that beforehand you don't necessarily know which features you are going to need to use. I am constantly discovering new useful features in most of the programs I use, having to install plugins for every feature I wanted to use would quickly become a pain , hamper discoverablity and the program would probably just end up back where it started in terms of size. Besides when you have a program with a long load time, this is not necessarily correlated with the number of features, it's more likely that it's some core part of the program that is taking a good chunk of the initialization time. The consistency argument is important, especially to anyone who has ever worked on telephone tech support. Being able to give somebody instructions on how to perform an action without having to worry about which of the 1000s of possible configurations their program is in is important. This is probably one of the big reasons desktop Linux never took off. Most professional programs like IDEs or photoshop are intended to be used by professional users anyway who will be likely to have a reasonably fast computer and will have invested some time in learning to operate the program properly. Adobe has actually had quite a few competitors over the years, currently there are programs like PixelMator and in the past they have had JASC , Corel, Macromedia (until they bough them) and of course GIMP to contend with. Joel Spolsky has a good article on this. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
• dhm116 15y ago
  At least they aren't following the movie industry's model of forcing you to watch paid advertisements first...
• munin 15y ago
  >When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer. what phone does he use? every phone that I know of takes at least two minutes to come up from a cold start, and has for the last ten years...
  • AndrewDucker 15y ago
    And there are a variety of programs on my phone that take a few seconds to start. Angry Birds has a splash screen, for instance.
    • jiggy2011 15y ago
      Agree, the only programs that start instantly on my android phone are the browser, phone and email apps and that's because they are probably always in memory. Everything else has a splash screen time that would put Eclipse to shame. Not to mention that HTC has now seen fit in the latest version of Sense to add a mandatory spinning animation that plays for ~2 seconds every time I unlock the phone before I am allowed to use it.
  • untog 15y ago
    Yeah, he's comparing two entirely different things. The phone is instant when turning the display on. My laptop is near-instant when resuming from sleep. Neither are instant at actually booting up.
    • MichaelApproved 15y ago
      And the phone is working off a fast flash drive while the PC is using a slow mechanical drive.
• zoul 15y ago
  I hate Adobe software with passion. I used to love Macromedia Fireworks, so that I bought a copy of Fireworks after Adobe acquired Macromedia. I had to jump through some crazy hoops to prove that I did not steal the product, and that was nothing compared to what I had to do after buying a new computer – it turns out that I was supposed to unactivate the product on the old one and then activate on the new one. This is not what you do to your customers. I don’t even want to start on the issue of software quality or customer service (I once did the mistake of trying to report an i13n issue with my copy of Fireworks). I swore there’s not going to be any software by Adobe on my computer anymore, and I even disabled Flash in my primary browser. I am lucky that I can do with the new wave of Mac graphics editors like Pixelmator. I was so happy paying for that product on the Mac App Store, getting a copy and doing nothing else that would require it to work. I was so happy that it starts immediately, that is has a decent UI. It’s not feature complete, it’s got its own bugs, but it’s a software and experience I am willing to pay for. Unlike Adobe. (Which is a company I once liked, being a typography geek and typesetting our school magazine in an old copy of PageMaker.)
  • mietek 15y ago
    Of course, PageMaker wasn't created by Adobe — you're thinking of Aldus, who also published the excellent FreeHand. Note the ongoing efforts to get Adobe to free FreeHand, including the recent antitrust lawsuit: http://freefreehand.wordpress.com/ http://freefreehand.wordpress.com/ Adobe is just another company where good software goes to die.
  • petenixey 15y ago
    And now that Fireworks has been mothballed its flaws with OSX Lion are so bad that it's barely useable... :(
  • ssharp 15y ago
    Do you think Pixelmator is a good replacement for Fireworks? Fireworks has been really great at allowing me to quickly mock-up different web layout concepts without having to write any HTML code. I know some are in the "concept with HTML camp", but I've found Fireworks to be so much faster. I've never bothered too much with Photoshop since Fireworks did 90% of what I wanted. I'm like many, however, in grumbling about how crappy Fireworks has gotten (at least on OSX, not sure about Windows) and am to the point that I'm ready to move on.
• jakeonthemove 15y ago
  What's the big deal? Showing a splash screen for less than 5 seconds (oh yeah, get an SSD) until everything initializes is better than opening a non-functioning UI ("the cloud" is not a solution - what are you going to do when your connection goes bad?). It would be nice to not have it, but for such a bloated program as Photoshop or After Effects, it's pretty much expected...
  • leviathant 15y ago
    r: "get an SSD" - I recently upgraded my computer at work, and Photoshop CS3 (which does more than enough for my purposes) opens up in under 1 second. After a day of using this computer with an SSD as the primary hard drive, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered one for my desktop at home. Easily added years of usable life to the computer I bought new in 2008.
• jiggy2011 15y ago
  My computer is pretty responsive, at least as much as my smartphone is and I'm not running anything special (No SSD, 4GB of RAM and an older model of quad core). Ok, I wait maybe 2-3 minutes for the computer to start (not even that if I just put it to sleep instead of turning it off). I can work for ~8-10 hours so those minutes aren't a big deal. There are a few programs that are particularly slow to start (eclipse, steam, openoffice) but that's mostly just because there is a lot of code to load and I'm sure a comparable application for a smartphone would be just as slow. I do run Linux most of the time though so there is probably a bias there towards smaller non-monolithic programs there and not having registry bloat helps. However I still remember the days of Windows 98 and how horribly slow everything was back then on anything apart from a freshly installed machine and having to wait a full minute for Office 97 to start, we've come a long way since those days. I can't see it taking long before every PC comes with an SSD drive (which is probably part of the reason smartphones seem responsive as well as having a well warmed cache). As for doing something like running a cloud instance of the program and then somehow syncing back to the desktop app seemlessly, that seems like it would add such an insane level of extra complexity and problems which is exactly what he seems to be against.
• Maro 15y ago
  This weekend the 3G mysteriously stopped working on my iPhone, so after months of use, I rebooted it. Rebooting the iPhone takes 1+ minute, and there _is_ a kind of splash screen shown during that time. The reason it appears instantenous during normal use is that it doesn't actually boot or load, it just turns the display back on. Also, many iOS apps actually have splash screens, you just don't see them very often as they're usually already running in the background (big apps like Facebook, and even small ones like PCalc Lite or Quotes). You can kind of achieve this with Windows + Adobe stuff too. Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster. Of course the OP is right, Adobe stuff is bloatware and sucks. Fortunately for non-pro designers, there are alternatives like Pixelmator and Paint.NET.
  • saturdaysaint 15y ago
    He's talking about smartphone app behavior, not the OS. A lot of good apps (with notable exceptions like Facebook and Kindle) work to minimize the "splash" by throwing up a graphic that looks like the UI, even while the app is loading and the UI (briefly) isn't even responsive to user input. I like it - it definitely smooths the transition into using that app.
    • jiggy2011 15y ago
      You can probably do that with a simple smartphone app where the first screen is basically just a static menu. However with (let's say) eclipse or photoshop , when the program loads the first thing it displays is either my code or a graphic I am working on. How would it allow me to interact with that in any kind of useful way without actually loading the program?
      • saturdaysaint 15y ago
        Good question - I understand that this is a lot harder for heavy professional apps, but I'm with the author in that I'd prefer a subtler transition. Maybe show me the rudiments of the interface (toolbars, menus, etc.) and a subtle progress bar for loading/opening the app and your last file.
• veyron 15y ago
  Figure this is the right time to ask about SSDs .. Any recommendations for MBP SSDs?
  • zokier 15y ago
    Intel drives have good reputation.
• feralchimp 15y ago
  Boo and/or hiss. If you hate splash screens, use simpler tools or get more RAM. When Photoshop finishes loading, it's ready to kick ass. The Finder, on the other hand, taunts with its almost-readiness. Faking readiness is far worse than setting and honoring expectations.
  • talmand 15y ago
    I agree, faking readiness is far worse to me than actually being ready.
    • chc 15y ago
      That isn't the choice here, though. The choice is between throwing up a big nonfunctional promotional screen or a nonfunctional version of the actual app.
      • talmand 15y ago
        I would say that showing a nonfunctional version of the app is "faking" readiness.
      • icebraining 15y ago
        A splash screen tells me "you can do something else, the window will show up when it's ready". A nonfunctional version forces me to poke it periodically until it works. If the author has the splash screen burned into his retina, (s)he's doing it wrong.
  • lusr 15y ago
    Agreed. If you're seeing that Photoshop splash screen regularly you simply don't have enough RAM. I keep my PC running for weeks on end and seldom close anything. With 12GB of RAM (which costs nothing) I almost never run out of RAM and every application is cached in RAM, so if I DO happen to close an application then reopening it is extremely fast. I shutdown my PC for the first time in weeks last night, and that was only because I was wary of the massive thunderstorm getting through my lightning protector. I don't actually understand why people shut their PCs down at all to be honest.
• motoford 15y ago
  Don't you think it's odd he is complaining about splash screens when Adobe is responsible for the worst thing to ever happen to the web -- those stupid flash intros ? Talk about a waste of time, you had to wait for the time waster to load and then wait for it to play
  • rsanchez1 15y ago
    He's got first-hand experience to back up his complaining.
  • talmand 15y ago
    Flash intros are the fault of the people who made them, not the software used to create them. When HTML5 canvas replaces Flash for such things will you then blame HTML5?
    • jiggy2011 15y ago
      True, although from what I remember the flash development tools seemed to provide much functionality that seemed to be aimed specifically at creating things like this. IIRC there was something that was basically a "flash intro wizard" however this may well have just been added due to demand from developers for such features.
      • talmand 15y ago
        I don't recall such a wizard in Flash itself, although I wouldn't be surprised. That kind of thing seems something that a third-party would create and there are a large number of them out there. The main thing to remember was that the Flash intro, at one time, was an accepted practice. It was an easy way for a company to introduce itself, much like a commercial. It wasn't until it was overused that people started to dislike it and now people only remember disliking it.
        • motoford 15y ago
          I disagree that it was an accepted practice. I don't know of any technical person who didn't hate them from the very first time they saw one. Remember this was back during dial-up days and you had to wait forever for that crap to load. I can't tell you how many sites I left before ever seeing their content because when I saw flash loading I just switch back to my search engine and find the next link. Heck, I still do that. edit: I forgot to mention my even bigger gripe about the flash intros, and that was because I was basically being forced to sit through a commercial before I could interact with the company. It went (and goes) against the very basics of web use.
• nitid_name 15y ago
  I'm not sure I'm a big fan of what it would take to fix this. Namely, "speed loaders" that sit in memory and eat up RAM. I've already seen what adobe's PDF speed loader can do on a system. Frankly, I'll manage my applications myself. Are you tired of waiting for Photoshop to launch? You might want to try leaving it open...
• podman 15y ago
  Photoshop CS5 took roughly 4 seconds to start on my MBA. Is this guy seriously complaining about 4 seconds? Several popular iOS (and I'm sure there are some on Android as well) take longer than that to load...
  • kamjam 15y ago
    Agreed, about the same on my machine. It's kind of expected. On my old machine I would just start Photoshop and go make a cup of tea. Or switch windows and carry on with something else. But I rarely use Photoshop... If you are doing this day in, day out then I think it justifies more RAM and/or an SSD.
• jnorthrop 15y ago
  I wonder how Kas Thomas feels about the credit roll that occurs at the start of a movie? You know the one where they show the logo of the movie studio, then the production company, then the producer, editor, et al. I see the software splash screen in the same light. It is giving credit to those who have put it together. Now, obviously entertainment is different then a work application, but many of us feel that software is art, just like a movie and that if someone wants to do a credit role then they should.
  • klez 15y ago
    Except they don't show the splash screen to praise who made the program. It's just to give you something to do while you wait. Just like reading shampoo bottles' labels in the bathroom.
  • AGorilla 15y ago
    Those haven't been at the start of a movie for 40 years.
  • smacktoward 15y ago
    That's an example that proves the opposite of your point. You may notice if you watch some older movies (pre-1950s, mostly) that they used to run the ENTIRE credits list at the start of the film. The WHOLE THING. Not just the credits you see at the beginning today, but also all the ones that today are listed at the END of the movie, too. The copyright notices for all the songs they used, the logos for their camera and film providers, the names of all the gaffers and best boys and Assistants To Mr. Bigshot... you had to sit through them all before the movie got underway. They don't do that anymore. Today only a very small number of Very Important People get credited before the start of the movie. Everyone else gets shunted to the end. Why? The answer is TV. When TV came along and movies started getting shown there, they no longer had a captive audience. The audience could now change the channel if they weren't being entertained -- which meant that there was pressure on the filmmakers to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE. So they moved nearly all the credits to run after the film, rather than before. That was a bit of a blow to all those other folks, of course, since credits at the end of a movie are credits nobody reads -- they're too busy leaving the theater or changing the channel. But it was necessary to conform to the audience's desire that they GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE. Which is Thomas' point: users' expectations are changing. Used to be that it didn't matter that much if your app was slow to load, because users didn't expect it to be fast. But the proliferation of mobile devices and lightweight apps is changing those expectations. So if you care about your users and want to hold on to them, it behooves you to GET ON WITH THE DAMN APPLICATION.
• JS_startup 15y ago
  I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy. His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it drives me insane -- if the OS or program isn't in a usable state when you show it to me, don't show it to me Loading speed is just one of a multitude of factors that come into play when making software. According to this Adobe employee it should be the chief most concern, even dominating other things like features, usability, UX, cost, technological debt, etc.
  • rsanchez1 15y ago
    It's the same for any complex program, smartphone or desktop. I have Picsel Smart Office on my phone and it has a boot time, because it's an office app and has to load resources to use the app. And on his proposed solution, he asks developers to empower users, to not make users feel belittled, and at the same time he asks developers to trick users into thinking the full app has loaded. How can you avoid belittling someone and trick them at the same time?
  • tintin 15y ago
    You are wrong. Everytime I start Blender (3D content creation suite) I'm blown away by the time it takes to start. Less than 2 seconds! Ready to use! Do I call Blender a complicates program? Yes I do. The feature list can compete with the one of 3ds Max.
    • talmand 15y ago
      I think it's unfair for you to call him wrong, what's wrong with what he said in the context of what he was saying? I remember Blender loading fast as well. But are you sure every single feature of the program is available as soon as the GUI is displayed? Because I wouldn't be surprised if there's some lazy loading going on. Maybe some things finish loading in the background so they are not available right away or maybe some things are loaded on demand to spread out the loading time.
• kenrik 15y ago
  Adobe is the king of bloatware and they will not fix it while they have us by the well "you know". If there were serious alternatives then Adobe would not be in the position it is today. Any company that requires me to PAY just to talk to outsourced tech support after I just bought $15,000 worth of software that is not working correctly seriously needs to get what's coming to it. "Oh sorry sir you are using a "server" with Indesign that requires escalation level 3, and that is $79 to talk to a level 3 advisor sir, kindly." Thanks a lot Adobe.
• rauljara 15y ago
  Louis CK has a fantastic rant about people complaining about technology being too slow (and technology, in general). It helped to put my own rage in perspective. I find myself getting less pissed at technology since watching it, and I kind of hope that lasts. (NSFW) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=relat...
  • billjings 15y ago
    I love Louis CK as much as the next guy, but he's not a technologist, and his perspective is not helpful to us in this context. In life, sure - have patience. Keep it in perspective. Appreciate what you have, and don't rage against things you can't change. This rant is not about life, though, it is about what makes for good and bad software. Which happens to be what we do for a living. In the grand scheme of things, we're all dead, and software doesn't matter. While we're here, though, it's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about the things that bug us about it. It's our job to make this little area of the universe better. I think taking that seriously is a good thing.
    • rauljara 15y ago
      Upvoted, because that was well said, and because I'll fully admit that CK's rant is not quite a proper response to the OP. But I do think that the original rant was clearly someone who let his rage batter the rational part of his brain into a pulp. He mentions things like that the iPhone experience is now what constitutes "minimally usable". Except that no PC (mac or otherwise) comes close to that level of experience and people are still using/buying them, so clearly he has a different definition of minimally usable than a sane person. He's also so annoyed at having to wait that he proposes worse solutions than the wait itself (a fake UI, that still logs actions; I foresee way more frustration from that than having to look at a splash image). Yeah, there's a lot of room to improve load times, and a well reasoned blog post on that would have been great. But when someone is ballistic to the point that they can't think straight anymore - I think a little comedic appeal to perspective isn't entirely out of line.
  • pessimizer 15y ago
• zokier 15y ago
  I for one prefer seeing splash screen for couple of seconds[1] rather than having laggy/half-functional UI appear instantly. Actually I'm more annoyed by Windows login, which shows desktop early while it's still starting up background apps, and thus being unusably slow. And the comparisons to mobile devices are just ridiculous. At least in my use, I'd estimate that on average apps on my desktop launch much more quickly than on my Android phone. And I challenge anyone to find a smartphone that boots up faster than a fresh Windows 7 install on a SSD (or even on a regular HDD). [1] I just timed: Photoshop 5 seconds, Word 2 seconds, both from warm caches. And that's with a 4 year old budget laptop.
• Jasber 15y ago
  About loading screens, I've always wondered why games don't try to get rid of these (maybe they do?). Anyone familiar with why you have to have loading screens in games? Would it be possible to pre-load a level while you're playing?
  • skymt 15y ago
    Most modern games use various tricks to minimize or eliminate loading screens, with varying degrees of success. Common ideas include using low-quality assets for far-away objects, dynamically replacing them when the player gets closer; creating assets that can easily be reused; and making the player wait in a small room or hallway while the next area loads. Sometimes this can backfire, as with the infamously slow elevators in Mass Effect, which are timed to always take as long as the worst-case load time for the area they're linked to. TV Tropes has a list of examples: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicLoading http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicLoading
  • bobbyi 15y ago
    They can't follow the article's suggestion of giving you a mini-game to play during the load screen because that would violate Namco's patent 5,718,632 which covers exactly that: http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632 http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632
    • talmand 15y ago
      I had totally forgotten about that patent.
    • jiggy2011 15y ago
      Wow , that's ridiculous. Although I'm not sure what game you could play in the 10 seconds or so it takes to load a program these days, plus you've got to load the game itself. I have always wondered though why when doing an OS install they never provided a game or something interesting to do while you wait rather than show adverts for the product you are currently installing ("Windows 7 has all these great new features!".. "I know , hence why I bought it.."). They could at least give me a browser to use though.
• varelse 15y ago
  5-10 seconds? This guy is complaining about 5-10 seconds? I hate bloatware. I despise behavior like the sloth and neglect Microsoft inflicted on Windows XP once Vista shipped and I loathe the abandonment of gingerbread phones like my late Droid G1 (unaffectionately nicknamed "the brick" in its final days) by Google once they entered the crunch phase for ICS, but 5 to 10 seconds?!?!?!? Get a grip... If an app has any mandatory online component whatsoever (not that photoshop does), its boot time is unavoidably non-deterministic. Good luck fixing that (not that there's any excuse for avoiding latency that can be avoided)...
• darrikmazey 15y ago
  While as a programmer I understand that perhaps this load time could be improved, and maybe splash screens are a lazy solution, but I wonder if it warrants this level of anger. Even assuming a generous 5 minute load time on photoshop (I don't know as I don't use it, but I doubt it's that much), and that you reload twice a day (once at the beginning of the day and maybe once after lunch), and you use it every weekday of the year, that's still less than 0.5% of your year. I'm not saying losing 43 hours of your life per year is insignificant, but a proportional response seems appropriate. You in all likelihood spend more time waiting at red lights.
  • nknight 15y ago
    He wrote a rant on his blog, he didn't kill anyone. What exactly would be "proportional"? Never speaking a word when something annoys you?
• dgallagher 15y ago
  I was hoping Adobe would patch Photoshop CS4 on OSX Lion so it stops crashing when quitting, and then hanging indefinitely if you try to re-launch it again without rebooting first. It's the most expensive software I've ever purchased which doesn't know how to [NSApp terminate:nil]; properly.
• aycangulez 15y ago
  I still use Photoshop 6.0 circa 1999. It loads in a few seconds max, and it has all the core functionality necessary for web graphics work. In fact, even PS 5.5 would do fine because it was the first version that supported Save for Web. If you are using the latest version of Photoshop for web work only, you are wasting time and money for tons of features you don't really need.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    Agree, I don't think Adobe has ever really positioned PS as a web tool I always thought of it more as something for people to process photos with, including huge photo files which are intended for billboards etc.
• d4nt 15y ago
  The title made it seem like this was going to be more of an whistle-blowing blog post by an insider. Nevertheless, this kind of rant is interesting in so far as it points to what I think a growing momentum behind the UNIX philosophy. What I mean by that is: small programs that do one thing well and interoperate with others. I wonder whether the underlying cause of this shift in thinking is the levelling off of CPU cycle speeds. Time was when the performance of something like Photoshop or Office would just prompt you to buy a better computer. People would assume their computer had gotten old or out of date. Now that getting new hardware doesn't magically fix things people are asking why certain things take so long and comparing programs' performance.
• readme 15y ago
  I suppose this is a good place to mention that I wasted 2 hours of my day zeroing my MBR because of Adobe. Apparently Photoshop installs some DRM crap on it. Proof: http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-CS4-VERSION/dp/B001EUDGO2 http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-CS4-VERSION/d... Proof: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254 I will not be using an Adobe product other than Flash again. I would ditch Flash as well, but last time I checked, gnash was not good enough to replace it yet. That's not an issue though. I'll just wait for HTML5 to kill it.
• lignuist 15y ago
  Another point is file size. Is it really necessary, that every version is twice as big (just estimating...) as its predecessor? At least for many websites this trend has been stopped, due to mobile requirements.
• MikeCapone 15y ago
  "Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster." My experience in OS X is that Photoshop has to be restarted very frequently or it just eats up more and more memory until it uses it all. Seems like bad memory management.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    That's possibly just because there is no other contention for the memory. By and large it is the OS that is broadly responsible for memory management, the OS hands out pages of memory to programs and it's upto the programs as to how they use them. If you have photoshop running and using a lot of RAM it is likely that were you to run another application the RAM usage of photoshop would drop to accommodate the other program as the OS will simply drop some of photoshop's pages and let the other program use them. There is not really any performance hit from doing this since any page that is not "dirty" (i.e has not been written to) which will be basically any pages containing program code does not need to be swapped back to disk. If you are concerned you should find a way to measure the quantity of IO going on in the swap area since heavy swap IO will be the best indicator that you either need more memory or something is not as it should be. For example I run a server that is often at 70% or so of RAM usage but has only swapped something like 10MB of data in the last month.
• stdbrouw 15y ago
  As much as I hate bloat and love svelte web apps that do just what I need and nothing more... I think we also need to accept that some people in some fields of work do pretty advanced stuff, and need pretty advanced software to do that stuff. Adobe InDesign in particular is a huge piece of software with tons of config options and obscure features and what-not, but I've never ever found a feature that made me think "what kind of useless, bloated bullshit is this?" I think Adobe teams fight very hard against bloat, but their business is based around power users and that just leads to a different kind of software.
• butterfi 15y ago
  I used to adore Adobe, but it all changed over time. It started when I only needed Photoshop, and yet Adobe insisted I install several other chunks of software for services I didn't want or need. In the end, I finally found a solution that lets me get my work done without all the excess Adobe bloatware. Thank you Pixelmator!
  • stdbrouw 15y ago
    I can also recommend Adobe's "Elements" apps. Pixelmator is very nice, but if you've gotten used to the Adobe way of doing things and don't want to relearn, Photoshop Elements is sort of like what Photoshop used to be before the Creative Suite.
• yummyfajitas 15y ago
  I don't use photoshop, but my emacs takes 3-5 sec to boot up. So lets see. Supposing I use emacs for 3 hours, 5 seconds is precisely 0.04% of the time I spent using it. I'd prefer if the emacs dev team focuses on new features for me to use during the other 99.96% of the time I spend using it. Iphone/Android apps are fast because they need to be. Often you use them for 30sec-5 min. On a 30 second use, 5 seconds is 16% of the time you spend using the app.
• glfomfn 15y ago
  What is so hard for people to understand ? Photoshop needs time to load, because that time is quite significant they give you some kind of feedback to let you know that 'hey the damn thing is loading, please wait', what's so bad with that? what would the alternative be? The title starting with "Adobe employee" tries to make it sound like its a significant opinion regarding the matter, the author of the article doesn't seem to be a programmer or holding a position that deals with the process of making a program, what's even worst is the fact that he is completely clueless regarding the matter, he suggest "e.g., show a UI right away and let an instance of the program in the cloud operate against my gestures, until the local copy boots fully and can re-sync with me", seriously ??? I started wondering if i am being trolled at that point. It takes 4 seconds to do a cold start of Photoshop on my laptop (which isn't a top notch laptop), on an older computer and with previous versions of Photoshop it would take 10-15seconds which would still be fine, the process doesn't block me from doing something else in the mean time.
• mmuro 15y ago
  I agree with him, in principal, that apps should be lighter and faster. However, Photoshop is just a giant program to do lots of complex things. It's a burden I'm willing to put up with (for now) because I have yet to make a transition to a similar, lighter, program.
• mariusmg 15y ago
  Adobe is the definition of bloat.
• luser001 15y ago
  I ranted about this a few days ago. My favorite idiocy on Windows is their background "optimization" of .Net binaries. https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412838.aspx?Redirected=true https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412... This service appears to perform a large number of I/O requests (probably reading/writing a large number of small files). It will totally consume the disk seek capacity, massively slowing down every other program that is also doing disk I/O (e.g., freezing Firefox awesomebar searches). The programmers at the linked blog congratulate themselves on how this mayhem lasts only 10 minutes on a typical computer. Note: I do not have an SSD. :( This and other idiocies will force me to get one next time.
  • noblethrasher 15y ago
    But the situation you describe should only happen once for each time you install or update what is a relatively major component of the OS.
    • luser001 15y ago
      Fair enough. This occurs roughly once in two months when I least expect it. But the point is that with just a bit more attention to detail, they could have made this process utterly unobtrusive: don't process more than once file per second, if you want want to build in heuristics to infer the disk seek bandwidth. Btw, Microsoft Security Essentials may be doing things like this. For me, it is totally not noticeable.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    I don't think it will be too long before every PC or laptop ships with an SSD as standard and mechanical disks will be relegated primarily to archiving duties.
• karolist 15y ago
  I don't think I've even seen a splash screen since SSDs became affordable in the past 2 years. Also I'm a "give credit where it's due" type of guy and surnames of people that made the great project I'm launching don't bother me. This whole blog post reminds me of the "first world problems" meme.
• kamjam 15y ago
  I await his next blog post "I got fired for throwing all my toys out the pram" with great anticipation, where he explains how throwing a massive hissy fit and not taking his (some good) points up with the team and management. I don't agree with this faking rubbish though, if it's not usable then I don't care. There's plenty of bloatware to get rid of in these programs, I doubt the splash screen is the biggest of worries!
• gavanwoolery 15y ago
  Photoshop really is not that complex - you could write a photoshop clone that would load in under a second, easily. But it loads all sorts of stuff you do not need up front - many fonts, textures, drivers for scanners, cameras, and so forth. I think the real problem is that Adobe seems to keep patching an already bloated code base - I think if they started fresh they could redesign it more efficiently...just my humble opinion...
  • Geee 15y ago
    Pixelmator is pretty much a clone of Photoshop, and it starts seemingly instantly.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    I think it would be difficult to write a photoshop clone that loads in under a second and provides the same level of performance when dealing with advanced filters on huge images with hundreds of layers. Anyway I doubt that all of that stuff is loaded at startup anyway.
• Too 15y ago
  They could at least display "tip of the day" or hotkeys while you are waiting to make the waiting time at least a bit productive. Why don't programs have this today? Most old programs had this but after starting up. Displaying it while the program is loading would be much smarter.
• Lockyy 15y ago
  What I find interesting is a story about Firefox Mobile. It used to get complaints about it being slow to load and that it needed to be sped up. The solution to this was that during load the browser would display an image of the browser as it is when loaded instead of just a black screen as it previously had. Complaints about slow loading screens decreased dramatically. So yeah, I'll be keeping this sort of thing in mind. This was all relayed to me from someone who attended the Firefox Mobile talk at FOSDEM.
• codesuela 15y ago
  when I read this I instantaneously thought about this rant from Louis CK [Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk Linux Mint and Windows 7 take 10 seconds to boot on my laptop with a SSD. That's amazing. Just a few months ago I would go make a sandwich while my PC would boot. If you have a problem with splash screens alt tab to the browser of your choice. If you think your PC boots to slow take out your smartphone and play with it. This is not to say developers should be wasteful with users time. Especially web developers know how import page speed is. But it's a complex program just give it a few SECONDS. Also one should mention Steam (the game distribution platform). If you are bored in between rounds you just bring up the steam panel and use the embedded browser to browse the web or chat with friends. But those at times minute long delays. Sure you could embed a email client in the OS the comes up long before the main GUI is loaded but you wont get to read much in 10 seconds.
• tambourine_man 15y ago
  In all fairness, Photoshop startup time did get a lot faster at version 10 (CS3), when they changed the type system to load only when needed. But yes, there is still a long way to go. I don't think we need iOS like hacks such as showing a PNG of the GUI to trick you into thinking loading is done. This solution has its own set of issues (responsiveness, not precisely matching your previous state in case of crash, etc). It's x1000 faster than my phone, we can do better. Modularizing, as shown above, is hard, but probably the best way to go. As programs grown to the size of a small OS, they should be treated as such.
• peteboyd 15y ago
  The video game industry has the same issue. Initial bloat screens. A lot. Skyrim for instance, it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to load the initial screen, which is just the logo of Bethesda. You know what is on the initial screen. A button for me to click that says Start. Once I click that button, then I have to hit Continue for it to load the last save point. Then another 30 seconds to 1 minute to load my game/map point. So basically, two actions and over a minute later, I am finally in the game. A much easier thing would be to just load my last save/map point. I can turn on the console, and know to come back in a minute. Just have it paused until I am ready to play. If I wanted to say restart the entire game, I could go into the menu system from there. I find this the case on almost all games. FIFA, Madden, Bad Company, Call of Duty. Just start the game I played last. If I regularly play online, go and find me a server automatically. Auto load my game, unless I hold down the start button or some other button that would then default to the menu. I don't care that Bethesda or EA made my game, I just want to play.
  • talmand 15y ago
    Keep in mind that a large amount of the time you see a splash screen (or five) in a game it's not because of loading, it's because of marketing.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    I imagine much of the stuff in the initial 30 seconds is necessary overhead that you would incur anyway. I prefer that a game does automatically load the last save point since it is less effort to simply click "continue" than it is to wait for something to load which I may not even want to do.
• shocks 15y ago
  This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life, where you have 16 milliseconds to do everything and it pays to be smart, use clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry (he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company producing software for the film industry. It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the country chasing a real programming job again...
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    My experience with games software is that it typically has much longer loading times than other software. I think this is justified though because what matters in a game is the perceived performance while the game is actually in operation. If when I load a game it spends an extra 10 seconds optimising quadtrees & shaders etc to give me faster game performance and enable 16 millisecond latencies then it is overall worth doing, since trying to load stuff off the disk while I am actually playing would harm the experience. I imagine photoshop developers do something similar.
• davesims 15y ago
  OP has a point. Not a f*cing important point, but a point. UIs can and should be faster, Adobe and MS are slow to catch on with current user expectations, and splash screens are annoying relics of a bygone era of bloated desktop UIs. Agreed. But in the end, to me it's just one more instance of Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk I guess I just don't get the tone. Why the righteous indignation? This not Human Rights we're talking about, it's software.
  • diggum 15y ago
    Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading any necessary libraries. I'm also at Adobe and my team recently performed a ground-up re-write of our application. Minimizing start-up time was a high priority item and we did as much as we could to reduce it, but file importers/exporters, codecs, and some plug-ins need to be validated and loaded at some point - would you rather have these costs as one-time, up-front fees or scattered throughout the application as a thousand tiny cuts every time you open some menu command or function that requires these libraries? But even so, professional desktop applications are not the same as lightweight mobile apps which tend to perform a limited set of tasks through a specific workflow. To compare the two is unfair and and bit clueless. And he brings up OS startup time, as if it doesn't take a LONG time for my Android or iOS devices to boot up - and they have less excuses as the hardware is pretty standard and fixed unlike my desktop machines. I think his rant about wasted time is valid, but misguided. There's more time wasted navigating non-intuitive interfaces or poorly laid-out common controls. There a lot more time wasted when an application you rely on to do your job doesn't offer the functionality or freedom of workflow to accomplish what you need.
    • pslam 15y ago
      > Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading any necessary libraries. How is that useful to a user? How many users even know what a "library" is? It might as well have a status bar announcing "Doing TECH thing 1 of 50...." It seems to me that a splash screen is just a diversion: showing the user just how much Really Important Stuff it's doing hides the fact that they're basically being told to Please Wait. You're trying to make it look exciting, when the truth is it's just getting in the way. It might as well just splash with "PLEASE WAIT" with no progress bar and no status. It has the same utility.
• jarrett 15y ago
  The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in 2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in 2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And I'm sure that the binaries for importing camera raw images don't come anywhere close to accounting for all the bloat in that time.) So, my computers have gotten better and better, while the demands I place on them have remained basically constant, yet boot time stays the same. The only thing I can think to blame is bloat.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    • dorianj 15y ago
      Disk speeds have increased greatly in the last 7 years. Compare an 80gb 7200rpm hard drive from 2005 to a 1tb 7200rpm drive from now and you'll see a very large sequential read/write speed improvement.
  • icebraining 15y ago
    "I don't use them, therefore they don't exist"? Of course Photoshop has plenty of new features each version. Just because you don't use them doesn't mean other people don't. It's a known problem: Everyone only uses 10% of the features in software but everyone has a different 10%.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    I imagine load time hasn't improved so much because that's not really what they are optimising for. You could of course still run an old version of Photoshop on a modern PC if startup time is really that important to you. I think it would be interesting to compare performance of Photoshop CS5 with Photoshop 6 (the first version I used) on a modern PC. I would expect of course that PS6 would start up almost instantly whereas CS5 would take a few seconds. However it would be interesting to also take a relatively large image file of the sort of size that a graphics designer might actually work with (let's say 500MB or so) and apply a bunch of the same filters across the whole image (in such a way as to produce an identical result) on the same computer and time them both. My guess would be that CS5 would be significantly faster which may be partly due to optimisations made at load time. Not sure if anybody has actually measured something like this though?
• jakejake 15y ago
  With an SSD drive photoshop loads very fast. It only takes about 2 seconds.
• steele 15y ago
  The WCMS he works on also has significant startup time, even beyond JVM warm-up. Ah well.
• alex_c 15y ago
  A splash screen basically tells me, in very clear-cut terms, that my time is worth nothing whatsoever. It's a fresh reminder that users' needs don't count as much as programmer convenience does. So... how much IS your time worth? How much extra would you be willing to pay for instantly-responsive applications? Programmer time isn't free, either.
  • pjscott 15y ago
    One other thing to keep in mind: if you dislike splash screens but don't have an SSD, then you have already placed a maximum dollar value on how much you care about your applications' loading time.
    • okamiueru 15y ago
      Exactly right. The splash screen is there only to show what it's doing while loading all the libraries and parsing setting files. If this guy/girl really hated the photoshop startup screen, he should do two things: 1. Get a better harddrive setup for his business. 2. Have photoshop start automatically after boot. A quick timed test on two striped SSD's: Photoshop starts up in 4 seconds from click to ready. Blender takes about 1.5 second.
  • davedx 15y ago
    Why should users have to pay extra?? The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$. The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity? There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.
    • talmand 15y ago
      Right, because all software is equal in complexity therefore they should all share the same requirement in resource loading and time?
    • icebraining 15y ago
• nixle 15y ago
  SSD, problem solved.
• indiecore 15y ago
  >Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop. They tried this, everyone got pissed off and asked for a splash screen so they knew it was loading.
• orthecreedence 15y ago
  Whether or not the programmers of Photoshop can make their app run faster, I have to say it's pretty sad that waiting 10 seconds is worth whining about. I understand this is unacceptable for a web app's page load time, but for a desktop app that loads an enormous amount of resources once before letting you use it seems acceptable to me. I think the real problem is that we are all so incredibly spoiled that waiting 10s is a huge inconvenience. I'm not saying it's not annoying. I don't like it either... that squirming feeling you get when you expect something to be fast and it isn't. But, like, get over it. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most important issue in the cosmos, waiting 10 seconds for an app to load would be about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 (if that). Perhaps there are more important things to write about.
  • TeMPOraL 15y ago
    This is just an extreme example of so called 'first world problems'.
• rwmj 15y ago
  Every, I'd say, 6 months or so, someone on the qemu mailing list posts a patch to add a splash screen to qemu. I don't understand why people persist in this: (1) Most hypervisor start-up screens aren't even seen by most users. (2) Spend that time and effort making the boot faster, not slowing it down with utterly useless stuff!
• johnohara 15y ago
  Splash screens are leftovers from the old-old days of text-based computing when you had to mask the fact that the program being loaded was going to take awhile (>30 secs). Hardware, software, network, total users, i/o, it didn't matter, it was better to say something than let users sit there at a terminal thinking nothing's happening. Or worse, tell their boss the "system's down again." No excuse for them today. They just say "big app", it's gonna be awhile.
• jsz0 15y ago
  With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for weeks at a time. There's not much downside in doing this besides some extra clutter in your dock/taskbar. For any fairly modern machine an upgrade to SSD + 8GB of RAM will mostly solve the problem. That's about $250-$300 to avoid the problem almost entirely. I feel like this is a byproduct of the race to the bottom of PCs over the last 5 years or so. Just because you can buy a $500 computer with a spinning disk and 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you should buy it. There are trade-offs to consider. Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10 second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants 2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.
• easterisle 15y ago
  Many people here are talking about how iOS works vs a desktop OS and that's the big difference - but its not about the SSD. If you have a high powered computer then its no problem to leave the adobe suite running and then just grab it from the task bar and get to work. The issue is that most people don't have high powered computers, at least powerful enough to run photoshop constantly while doing other things (HD videos, netflix, chrome+firefox, etc…. non work things). Adobe and other big software companies are going to continue to push the envelope no matter how fast our computers get in terms of resource use. Has photoshop gotten faster in our lifetimes? No! It just wants more and more resources with every release. So what is the difference between how apps behave on iOS and how they behave on the desktop? Backgrounding. Very very few apps (ableton live is one that has some "freeze" type features) don't have any way for you to shut down portions of the app or put the app to sleep so that you can start it up quickly. On iOS this is how apps are expected to behave, and it shows. But, even if Apple did bring backgrounding to the desktop, I imagine Adobe would be one of the last to support it - and I only say this because of my previous personal experience with Adobe products like Flex, LCCS, etc… I just thank code I'm not a designer...
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    I would say that overall modern versions of photoshop do feel faster than older ones. Of course photoshop is intended for professional designers with reasonably high end computers, it was never intended for the use case of somebody using a netbook to touch up a few photos as there are other programs for that. As technology has improved people will expect more from designers so they need more powerful tools optimised for working with large file sizes etc so Adobe are going to expend more effort maximising performance on higher end modern workstations then they are making sure it loads quickly on a five year old netbook. Just because every teenager wants to use pirate CS4 to tack together a logo for their band does not mean that is what adobe should optimise for.
• toast76 15y ago
  I hate it when people say "I switch my phone on and it starts instantly". No it doesn't. My iphone takes about a minute to start...of course I never switch it off, so it's not a problem. If you never "turn off" Photoshop or Office, they too will appear the instant you click on them. Amazing!
• jwarzech 15y ago
  I stopped reading at "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud"
• tjoff 15y ago
  Imagine if your phone or iPad took as long to boot as a Windows laptop. Would you use it? Would it be usable? My android phone (Nexus S) takes longer than my 6 year old Windows laptop do (sure, it's updated with an SSD but even without it would be a close call), my mothers tablet isn't faster either. Solution? I never turn either off. Problem solved. Hibernate for longer sessions, sleep if battery isn't important and I know I will use it for the next few days. On my workstation I never turn off heavy applications anyway. On my laptop I'm limited by my 32 bit Win7 OS so that's a burden, but I can work with it. The 8 GB I have in my workstation isn't ideal either, tempted to get a 24 or 32 GB machine but probably can't justify replacing the current machine just yet. I see no reason to get less RAM on a new setup though. Also I really appreciate having the whole application ready. Having parts of it lazy-load can be way more agonizing than a slow boot. And with an SSD you don't have to wait long anyway, I always tend to fiddle with other windows during the boot so I'm not that annoyed. The splash screen itself can be annoying if it claims window focus or is just in the way but they exist for a reason. There should something telling me that the application is booting (firing up a task manager doesn't count), I agree that there are less obtrusive ways for this than a splash screen though and for that OS developers should be blamed for not realizing this.
• ec429 15y ago
  Solution: don't use monolithic applications with bloated GUIs. Instead, use small, simple tools, driven from the command line where possible. If the problem domain is naturally graphical, have a lightweight graphical frontend driving the small simple tools through shellouts or a plugin or library interface. In other words, use UNIX. This isn't difficult to understand, guys.
• marquis 15y ago
  Network-reliant apps should check for connectivity during loading, this can take a few seconds to verify everything. Would he rather the app doesn't do any environment validation and present errors when trying to run specific tasks? Can you imagine, working on a complex document only to find out when saving that you don't have enough disk space or your network connection isn't valid. Splash-screens are an important time to determine whether everything is there that you need to do.
• beedogs 15y ago
  hey, I have a solution. Buy a damn SSD if you want to load a 1GB program faster.
• asherjb 15y ago
  A splash screen seems like a pretty innocuous way of letting you know that the app is not ignoring you. I imagine that not too many people take such violent aesthetic offense to them as this guy. Still, they probably allow a longer load time than users would otherwise find acceptable in their absence.
• dustingetz 15y ago
  if gimp can insta-load, and photoshop gives me a 60 second splash screen, designers are still going to use photoshop. i would prefer Adobe continues to invest in the features that matter, not startup times.
• vacri 15y ago
  What a troubled and complex world we live in, when large, complex programs take 5-10 seconds to load. I'd much rather my devs work on useful features instead of trying to fool me into thinking my productivity suite is loaded a few seconds earlier (and also not dealing with all the bugs that that introduces).
• oofoe 15y ago
  A lot of people here seem to think that complaining about a five to six second start time is just whining. I believe you're wrong -- it is a legitimate and valid complaint and here's why: Most software can't run for very long. A lot of high-end software can be /very/ unstable (hello, Maya! ;-). The user is not just starting that software once at the beginning of the day for a long productive day of work, they are all to often starting it again after a crash. Or after they shut it down to get enough RAM to run Excel. Or after rebooting Windows for /another/ mandatory update from IT. I once had to restart a particular high-end compositing package thirty times in an hour. Twenty seconds of the average two minutes were spent staring at the splash screen. But I had to do it, because I needed thirty frames rendered and a particular plugin crashed after running one frame. The user is not starting your software to admire your credits or the clever graphic design of your logo. They are starting your software to /use/ it get a job done, a job that they have in mind to do and any distraction at all (even a harmless splash screen) is a new stumbling block on their way to resuming their task. I heard of a study done back in the mainframe days that determined that anything that took less than two seconds felt instantaneous to the user. However, anything longer (even five seconds!) took "forever". In my years of programming, I have found nothing to disprove this (possibly) apocryphal conclusion. Your user's time is valuable. Your user's mental state and flow are valuable. As programmers on Hacker News, we all know about concentration and flow, right? Extend your users the same courtesy you expect from your tools. Help them keep things going, don't break their rhythm and don't let them lose context.
  • jiggy2011 15y ago
    If I was using some software and it was so unstable that I had to restart it over-and-over again I'd conclude that there was either something horribly wrong with my setup somewhere in which case I'd try and resolve it or that the software was simply a POS and I would stop using it. I very rarely have program crashes these days and when I do it is usually down to either a failing hard disk or that I am using something version 0.x of something. I do agree to an extent about Windows updates though , these do tend to nark me (especially the nag screens). Unless it's patching something that would allow privileged remote code execution onto my box right now it can wait. Any company that was genuinely worried about their staff losing productivity due to slow program loads would just install SSDs onto all their computers, afterall this is what we at HN generally advocate. What I find somewhat annoying though is software that has a lot of "visual effects" such as windows that fade in and out where you can't interact with the program until the effect has completed. This is only annoying though if it would have been instant if the effect was not there.
• jarek-foksa 15y ago
  I remember there was Photoshop clone called Pixel which was doing cold startup in less than 1 second, so Photoshop slugginess is definitely not caused by technical limitations.
• prtamil 15y ago
  For One time if you see splash screen its not a problem. But for example if visual studio crashes so often and it makes you see to splash so often then as author mentioned i would feel like i would commit seppuku. They should try caching or something .