"Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at mucow.com> is widely believed to have written:

> One of my experiences is that it matters less how fast something 
> actually is, rather than the expectation that something is about to 
> happen.
Exactly - basic UI rules that we knew about thirty years ago. It amazes
how often it is ignored in 'modern' software.

> The user experience in Squeak is to display a partial, empty window 
> while doing some silliness involving data operations, and upon the 
> completion of the silliness, expands and begins to display the window.  
> The display of the partial window creates an expectation in the minds of 
> users that something is about to, and should, happen.
This is really dumb. There is no need to create the window until and
unless the beDisplay primitive is called. (possibly one might need some
sort of window under some OSs in order to get events?) The change is
really simple - that's how it works on Acorn and I did once do it for
unix as well. It makes a headless system simpler; you just don't call
the beDisplay method and no window appears. Duh.
> 
> If, instead, we were to display a banner of some kind (modifiable by 
> changing a resource file for particularized applications), preflight and 
> complete the I/O off-screen, and only then show the window when 
> complete, the end-experience of the start-up would be substantially 
> crisper and snappier.
That would be sensible for many cases. It could be done via platform
resource stuff or maybe even by sticking a bitmap in the image in a
known place guaranteed to be uncompressed and available to the vm in
short order? Pixel-endianness might be an issue but it probably
survivable.
> 
> Strongly suggest doing this as a matter of course -- displaying a 
> partial, and unexpanded, window with nothingness is a bad idea as a 
> matter of system interface design practice.
Abso-bloomin-lutely.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Mihi ignosce. Cum homine de cane debeo congredi
= Excuse me. I've got to see a man about a dog.