On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Calum Benson wrote: > Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:07:31 +0000 > From: Calum Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: karderio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Usability] Splash screens and startup notification > > On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 11:59 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote: > > > The HIG doesn't mention them as far as I recall (updates to the HIG > > notwithstanding). > > Hmm, no, it doesn't, but discussions about them on these lists usually > come out fairly strongly against. If an application is going to take a > few seconds to start up, chances are you want to get on with something > else while it's starting. Even if it's a well-behaved splash screen, > that usually still means having to move or dismiss a window that's > popped up in the way of what you were doing, which is always annoying. > And of course, if the app isn't going to take a few seconds to start up, > you don't need a splash screen anyway :) > > FWIW, splash screens also tend to be fairly colourful, which is bad for > accessibility. > > > Abiword has a splash screen and I think it is an interesting example worth > > taking a closer look at. Abiword is so fast to start up you probably > > wouldn't see the splash screen at all on a modern machine. The orginal > > AbiSource developer wanted to make sure the branding was shown, so the > > splash runs seperately and is shown for ~5 seconds even though the program > > is already ready to go. > > That sounds pretty evil to me :)
Okay less evil than most splash screens but still evil. "The lesser of two evils is still evil" > Many users don't think to click on splash screens because historically > they've always been non-interactive, so deliberately extending the > startup time for those users isn't really very friendly. I know I'd be > a bit pissed off if I discovered after using an app for a few years that > I could have made it start up in half the time just by clicking on its > splash screen... There is also a prefernce allowing it to be turned off, and a command line arguement --nosplash unfortunately some applications use --no-splash and disbling the splash one application at a time is painful. Erm right, anyways... So only a few people interested in heavily branding their product actually want splash screens, users dont want them and startup notification covers any technical excuse there might have been for using a startup dialog. I/We should file a bug and propose an addition to the Guidelines strongly discouraging the use of splash screens? If someone is convinced splash screens are a necessary evil should we even try and convince them how to make a less evil splash screen? Thanks in advance Sincerely Alan Horkan _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
