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Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1].

Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on [1] https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8dfda86dd346ccde4fc8b5fc0173c4dd.gif https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...

metalliqaz 1y ago
you just don't like how it looks, or is there something else wrong with it?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  It's just moving, it gives no actual indication of progress.
  - metalliqaz 1y ago
    this reminds me of a tool at work that uses a progress bar but the software doesn't calculate the job size so it just fills up quickly and then goes back down again, and repeats endlessly.
    - EvanAnderson 1y ago
      I don't have the time to research where I heard this, but I recall a UI focus group study that found pretty much equal user satisfaction between accurate linear progress bars and random progress bars, but universal dissatisfaction with progress bars that "reset". My own feelings mirror this finding.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      I called those Congress bars, con being the antonym of pro.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents. It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be. One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place. Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place as one character. And the early "spinner" was: - \ | / that would cycle in place as one character. Hmm, not sure this will render properly on HN but it is hyphen, backslash, pipe, forward slash.
    - winocm 1y ago
      The latter is known as a "twiddle" in BSD land. (c.f: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/lib/libsa/twiddle.c https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/...)
    - foxglacier 1y ago
      Also back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.
- wibbily 1y ago
  I second everyone talking about fake progress bars, but yeah I was just talking aesthetics. Having a progress indicator with obvious segments and animating it with a smooth tween looks wrong. Compare the above with [1], which is how Apple does it - [1]: https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/20351752/file/original-ba0e48d5741db3934be88b945a5577ee.gif https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/20351752/file/original-b...
CrimsonCape 1y ago
You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading. Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever. I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?
  - int_19h 1y ago
    It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time. That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 installer doing things like hardware detection - those estimates were often wildly off.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      And of course... https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/
- rzzzt 1y ago
  There's also the "Achilles and the tortoise" solution where the progress bar consumes the remaining 80% of unclaimed space in each iteration.
kjellsbells 1y ago
The irony of progress indicators like the sunburst here is that everything okd is new again In the Before Times your UNIX would have a progress bar that was basically the same spinning icon: overwrite - \ | / - \ | / in the same character location in quick succession. It was as useless then as the spinning sunburst is now. The linear indicator provides two bits of information: that something is happening, and that progress is being made towards completion. The sunburst only provides one.

metalliqaz 1y ago

you just don't like how it looks, or is there something else wrong with it?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AlecSchueler 1y ago
It's just moving, it gives no actual indication of progress.
- metalliqaz 1y ago
  this reminds me of a tool at work that uses a progress bar but the software doesn't calculate the job size so it just fills up quickly and then goes back down again, and repeats endlessly.
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    I don't have the time to research where I heard this, but I recall a UI focus group study that found pretty much equal user satisfaction between accurate linear progress bars and random progress bars, but universal dissatisfaction with progress bars that "reset". My own feelings mirror this finding.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    I called those Congress bars, con being the antonym of pro.
- saltcured 1y ago
  Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents. It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be. One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place. Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place as one character. And the early "spinner" was: - \ | / that would cycle in place as one character. Hmm, not sure this will render properly on HN but it is hyphen, backslash, pipe, forward slash.
  - winocm 1y ago
    The latter is known as a "twiddle" in BSD land. (c.f: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/lib/libsa/twiddle.c https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/sys/...)
  - foxglacier 1y ago
    Also back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.
wibbily 1y ago
I second everyone talking about fake progress bars, but yeah I was just talking aesthetics. Having a progress indicator with obvious segments and animating it with a smooth tween looks wrong. Compare the above with [1], which is how Apple does it - [1]: https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/20351752/file/original-ba0e48d5741db3934be88b945a5577ee.gif https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/20351752/file/original-b...

CrimsonCape 1y ago

You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading. Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever. I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?
- int_19h 1y ago
  It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time. That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 installer doing things like hardware detection - those estimates were often wildly off.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    And of course... https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/
rzzzt 1y ago
There's also the "Achilles and the tortoise" solution where the progress bar consumes the remaining 80% of unclaimed space in each iteration.

kjellsbells 1y ago

The irony of progress indicators like the sunburst here is that everything okd is new again In the Before Times your UNIX would have a progress bar that was basically the same spinning icon: overwrite - \ | / - \ | / in the same character location in quick succession. It was as useless then as the spinning sunburst is now. The linear indicator provides two bits of information: that something is happening, and that progress is being made towards completion. The sunburst only provides one.