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."

Comments

Adobe complaining about bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe complaining about bloat?

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[homey of my owney]

More specifically, doesn't every Abode program have a splash screen and don't they take a loooong time to load?

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[localman57]

Yeah. But obviously, having some stuff running "In the Cloud" is the answer. Crap. It reminds me of 1999 all over again, with the word "Cloud" replacing the word "Internet" in all sort of stupid places:

1999: Five years ago, this would have been totally unworkable. But now we can use The Internet !
2001: Why the fuck did we think that was gonna work?


2012: Five years ago, this would have been totally unworkable. But now we can use The Cloud !
2014: ...

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[GameboyRMH]

Forget that, what crazy-ass world does this guy live in where your Internet connection is faster than local disk access!?!?

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[Squash]

My friend, you are mistaken. You will not find 1 Gbit much less 10 or 100Gbit unless the "right place" to live is a datacenter. Average internet speeds from July last year are still in the single-digit Megabit range. Local storage is several orders of magnitude faster than Internet for the foreseeable future.

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy works at Adobe. For all we know, his desktop interface IS entirely flash, and Internet access IS faster than his local disk.

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[flyingsquid]

What annoys me about Adobe's splash screens isn't that they exist, but that they are so hideously ugly. Right now, Adobe welcomes me to its programs with this monstrous, abstract geometric shape. I know I'm running Photoshop if the geometric shape is blue. If I'm in illustrator, then the shape is colored orange.

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.

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[Asic Eng]

IIRC KDE3 had a style guide requesting that splash screens would be all inside the application window. I always thought that was a brilliant idea. Whether an app can be made to load instantaneously might depend on computing power (although I agree with him, that this shouldn't be an issue for modern computers, anymore) but the really annoying thing about Splash screens is that they sit there blocking access to your desktop, just to tell you "look I'm loading". There is certainly never a need for that.

Other than that, I think there are many good usability ideas in smartphone/tablet GUIs which ought to be brought to the desktop. Not the stupid stuff like making a desktop UI look like it was intended to be used with a touchscreen, but doing away with all the superfluous confirmation dialogs. An application should not ask you whether "you really want to quit" you already told it that - instead it should make sure that when you quit nothing bad happens. If you were working on a document but didn't save that yet - then just keep the working copy when the program is closed. Don't overwrite what's in the saved copy and don't throw it away - just restore it when the application is opened again, and suddenly quitting word processor is no longer dangerous. When quitting a music or video player it should remember what you were playing and come back to that when the application is started again. A video player should keep the position basically for every movie it has been playing, so if you come back to it later you can continue to watch from the same position, even if you have watched something else in between.

Remove the danger rather than asking the user twice when doing something dangerous.

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[DrVomact]

See also "time-sharing", "client-server" and "thin clients". Much of the evolution of computers has been a power struggle between centralization by technology producers and decentralization by users. "The cloud" is just more of the same.

But which is it? Are we centralizing or decentralizing right now? I tend to lose track. As far as I know, the current "cloud" talk mostly means "storage of your data on our servers". I've seen it used this way a lot in the "smart phone" context. I'm guessing that because we don't know where the servers are, we're supposed to think this is a form of decentralization. As if vagueness were the same as decentralization! We send our data off into the great unknown, and...well...that's a decentralized as it gets, right?

Not really, of course; it's jargon that is intended to get people to think that they're storing their data on neutral, trustworthy servers. If the instructions actually said "back up your personal data to the Google (or Apple) server", then we might ask if we can really trust Gapple with that data . But if we keep our stuff in a cloud...well, who asks about the integrity of clouds?

The other way I've heard "cloud" used is as a form of wishful thinking that features programs executing on unspecified servers, along with our data. Of course, if the wish comes true, it will be Gapple servers that run the programs and keep the data, but we won't be troubled with that level of detail. (For all I know, this sense of "cloud computing" has already been implemented, and everybody is doing it—and I'm just so totally out of it that I haven't noticed.)

For what it's worth, I saw fluffy things labeled "The Cloud" on gee-whiz marketing slides for a super-computing company I used to work for back in 1998. Nobody knew what it was, of course (yes, I asked, bad move if you cared whether Marketing liked you). I'd say it was—and is—a marketing meme trying to push its way into reality.

Re:Adobe complaining about bloat?

[phantomfive]

Best ad I've seen lately is from Western Digital:

The Western Digital Personal Cloud! Have your own backup of data in the cloud in your own home! Maintain control of your data.

I was going to try to explain why it's funny, but if you don't get it, you never will.

Adobe against bloat

[Noughmad]

Kettle, meet blackhole.

I have a similar complaint about web pages

[4444444]

It really bugs me when a webpage take forever to load because it's waiting on ad servers to dish up a new ad
Why can't they write there pages to load the ads last so you can read the page while the ads load?

The Added Infrastructure

[eldavojohn]

Well, I'm dumbfounded. What is this man's capacity over at Adobe? One the one hand hats off to him for having the balls to come out with such a post and to end it with:

You can e-mail the CEO of Adobe at snarayen@adobe.com (to tell him to keep me or fire me).

But on the other hand, I wonder if he was aware of the network problems some of his proposed solutions represent. Surely, he must realize that "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud" amounts to increased network traffic. Don't even get me started on the privacy of those "gestures." Let's say you open up Photoshop to edit some 12 megapixel family pictures immediately. Are they transferred to the cloud in the process? And transferred back? Who has the network to do that faster than just loading to main memory with CPU cache? This increases what Adobe must now host as far as server farms and will, probably, raise the price of Photoshop in doing so. And, you know, it's already too expensive for me. Furthermore his post rails against "bloatware" but it's not like hosting this out on the cloud is going to make the application any less bloated. On the contrary, it can only make software more intricate, bloated, buggy, susceptible to attack, expensive, etc. Furthermore are there any users out there that are stationed on top of an internet backbone on Google's campus that could even take advantage of this additional functionality? Perhaps decades into the future this will be reality but until the infrastructure catches up to your consumers, this is a logistical headache.

As a developer, this all sounds very much like a two year old prattling off "and then I want a hover board, and then I want a flying car, and then ..." ad infinitum while we're still concentrating on minimizing highway deaths. He's probably sitting there with the latest iPhone asking why everything doesn't run like this but I have coworkers that are complaining about the latest iOS 5 updates to their older iPhones and all the problems associated with it. Good luck with pushing that "instant on" standard to all hardware out there man, I really will be amazed if you pull it off.

Welcome to the real world, Kas.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Four things:
1) Launching an app from the cloud isn't going to be faster. Hell, many of those apps already use a modal web dialog that essentially acts as a splash screen while all the Javascript bloat sent down to the client gets its defecations together.

2) Angry Birds has some of the worst launch time that I've ever seen - and it's a top tablet and phone app.

3) Adobe, you want disregard for users? Try your stupid EULA clickthrough every time a new version of your PDF reader comes out.

4) Try a usability test in an app without a splash screen some time. What you get is poor end users clicking (launching) the app multiple times because it looks like "nothing's happening". The splash screen is an "ack" at the usability level - "yep, we're launching the app!" As long as it's not modal and the wait isn't long (e.g., the user can go finish surfing on his browser during the 10-15 seconds the apps loads) then there's usually no problem.

Instant Gratification

[Roger Wilcox]

The author of this article is an asshole who doesn't understand how computers work. To paraphrase him: "I want it, and I want it now. Period. PERIOD." Sometimes even with computer technology as advanced as it is, applications need time to load. A splash screen says "Don't worry Mr. Computer User, this program has successfully launched and is now loading." Without the splash, you'd sit and wonder if the program was loading or not... and then probably launch it a second time before it was finished loading, further slowing the process.

Loading . . .

[Art3x]

Loading . . .

First post!

Ah, nuts

What kind of...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

How about - now call me kooky - using some of the massive parallelism that desktops have been shipping with for the last half-decade? Launch background threads to do your resource loading; ensure that your main UI thread is doing as little blocking work as possible? You know, all the "tricks" that have been around for ages, but fell into disuse until mobile platforms became mainstream?

What kind of diseased mind thinks that the answer to a slow-loading client-side app is to connect it to a cloud instance, thus introducing external dependencies and unpredictable network latency?

Re:I have always been annoyed by splash screens

[Noughmad]

They are good for really long processes (OS or window-system startup, game loading), because they give confirmation that something is really happening. However, they have to have progress bars or at least something (I like KDE's system with icons) by which you can tell how far it is.

However, I have noticed a recent trend towards splash screens with an endless loop and no connection to what's actualy happening. Window 7 has such a screen, so does Ubuntu. This is something I'm very annoyed by, because I always think it's complete before it actually is.

Re:I'm an iPad user

[Necroman]

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.

Re:Notes?

[MBGMorden]

Nonsense. Lotus Notes is one of the best operating systems out there. As soon as it gets a decent email client and calendaring solution it'll take the market by storm. Just wait.

Inconsistent Premise

[fiordhraoi]

The author complains about various things. He may have a point with some of them, but some are just ridiculous. For example, he mentions how it takes X amount of time to boot up his laptop, but his phone starts "instantly." I am 100% sure that his phone does not start up instantly from a reboot. Rather, his phone is simply on the vast majority of the time. The more complex the application, the longer it takes to prepare to run. I know numerous applications on both IOS and Android that deliver a splash screen while they load up. Many of these are games or similarly graphic intensive applications (comparative to other more "utility" focused apps). Or if they do not have a splash screen, they deliver no useful function while the data is loading. Ever started up google maps or something similar, and seen your position sitting there on a completely blank field for five or ten seconds? While I agree that perhaps splash screens/load times should be more streamlined as a whole, this "zero load time" environment that he purports to enjoy with phones and tablets simply does not exist.

Re:Notes?

[localman57]

So it's like the Playbook then?

Re:I'm an iPad user

[Pharmboy]

Remember when most minor websites had splash screens? Usually flash animation. Was particularly true for gaming clans and other small sites. Splash screens are so 2002.....

I don't mind a splash while it loads drivers, etc. for a few seconds, like Photoshop does, but a splash that stays there until you click to start using the program, well that is just excessive. I already bought the damn program, you don't need to keep advertising it to me, and I already KNOW what the name of the program is, I just started it....

Always-on-top

[Scutter]

I don't mind splash screens, but I HATE HATE HATE splash screens that insist on always-on-top. Let me launch the app and then go back to what I was doing while it loads. When you force always-on-top, you're basically saying "Stop everything you're doing and look at me for 30 seconds!"