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A Rant Against Splash Screens
An anonymous reader writes "This controversial post by Adobe's Kas Thomas asks if splash screens are just a sign of program bloat and callous disregard for users. It suggests that big programs should launch instantly (or appear to), perhaps by running against an instance in the cloud while the local instance finishes loading. Users of cell phones and tablets are accustomed to apps being instantly available. This is the new standard for performance, the author argues. Nothing short of it will do, any more."
initial load time of most apps takes a while in the iPhone / iPad world. If its a good programmer, they will be loading content during that splashscreen. For the apps that look like they load right away, it may be a lie. A lot of devs will take a screenshot of the app when it was closed last, then when it opens again it shows that screenshot until the app fully loads.
Its not what it is, its something else.
But not so long ago, Adobe Illustrator would fire up and you'd get this picture of Botticelli's Venus gracing your screen. A piece of fine art. It provoked a lot of positive reactions- it was literally a familiar face that you saw every time you fired up the application. A sort of welcome. A reminder that even if you're doing something as boring as fixing up a bivariate plot, you're using some of the more artistically-inclined neurons in your head. You associated what you were doing with, well, art. And when you saw that face in your computer screen, your brain recognized it and started getting itself in its "lets-go-be-artistic" mode. Photoshop would have a picture of an eye and a camera lens- reminding you that you were manipulating pixels the same way that photographers used to manipulate film. The new splash screens look like something you'd see in a powerpoint presentation at a large corporation... they feel, in a word, soulless. They don't make you feel like an artist, they make you feel like a corporate drone.
As for the article's contention that splash screens are inherently bad... I disagree with that. They're sort of like the cover art for albums. Back in the day, music came on spinning discs, and people would put artwork on the sleeves that the disks came in. And you'd associate the artwork with that disk in your head, so that sometimes all you'd have to do is look at the art and it would evoke all the emotions of the music and the lyrics of the whole album. There were also these things called "books" that were made out of dead trees, and we were never supposed to judge books by what was on the cover, but a good book cover on a good book... it was like seeing the face of an old friend. A good splash screen can do the same. I can't help but look at Botticelli's Venus and think warmly about hours spent tweaking teensy little handles on points with Illustrator.
If there are any Adobe people out there, I really, really wish you'd consider bringing back Venus and the eye-and-lens motif.