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 :) 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... Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Desktop System Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
