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Anyone else here have an unhealthy fascination with progress bars?

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nudone:
hmm, i do tend to like progress bars too. very minimal ones. it'd be nice to have a physical one for the real world (i bet you can buy one from somewhere).

thought it was just me. but it makes sense we'd all love 'em - doesn't it.

f0dder:
And I hate those bars that are just an animated thing that doesn't really go to 100%, or starts over when it gets to 100%. They just indicate that your system hasn't frozen up entirely, but give you no idea how much progress has actually been made on the task or that anything is actually really happening at all.-Deozaan (January 11, 2011, 02:25 PM)
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Amen!

Those kind of "progress bars" should be banished, and replaced with some other form of animation indicating that the program is still responsive. The exception to this is if the program needs to do a very short (a few seconds max) of precalculation in order to determine the final result... which also means that a file copy dialog should start with one animation while calculating transfer time, and then switch to a progress bar.

Renegade:
Oh, and I've been guilty of inserting delay timers in two installers I've made, because installation was too damn fast... even on the old machines those several years back when I did the software :-[ :-[ :-[
-f0dder (January 11, 2011, 12:00 PM)
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I remember installing the first Silverlight betas multiple times because they installed too fast.

Waaayyyy back, computers used lights to let people know that they were working. It's just comforting to know that something is going on and that you are getting closer to your goal.

f0dder:
Waaayyyy back, computers used lights to let people know that they were working. It's just comforting to know that something is going on and that you are getting closer to your goal.-Renegade (January 11, 2011, 02:36 PM)
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Mmmmh, blinkenlights! - it definitely has it's charm.



The term is explained over at wikipedia :)

Eóin:
Well here's a guy who really loves progress bars.

I also enjoyed this related article: Progress bar, the lie we all accept

Remember the good old days, when a progress bar in the user interface actually provided an indication of, well, progress? Alas, today the progress bar devolved into little more than a dancing monkey, doing the electric slide back and forth in its tiny box in an attempt to simultaneously communicate to me that something is happening while also trying to distract me from from the fact that I'll be waiting some indeterminate period of time for that thing to finish.-http://blogs.msdn.com/b/texblog/archive/2007/04/30/progress-bar-the-lie-we-all-accept.aspx
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Also, re the blinking lights. This excerpt from Airplane 2 was always one of my favorites

Soldier: Those lights are blinking out of sequence.
Buck Murdock: I see.
Soldier: What should we do?
Buck Murdock: Make them blink in sequence.-http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Airplane_II:_The_Sequel
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