On May 15, 2012, at 1:15 PM, Alex Zavatone wrote: > Right after clicking on an app's icon, the splash screen/launch screen shows > that the device has indeed paid attention to you and responded in the manner > you expected, namely, the application has launched and is proceeding to load. > I can not see how this is a bad idea.
It’s psychological. Splash screens make the launch time *seem* slower. The screen is in the user’s face saying “Hi! I’m starting up now but I can’t listen to you for a while because I’m really slow at launching, so just admire our spiffy logo while you’re waiting. Check out the lens flare! Your usage is super important to us, so just hang on until we actually finish setting everything up. It’s almost ready now…” It’s the equivalent of calling and immediately being put on hold. Now, if your app is going to take five or ten seconds to become responsive, then I’d agree you can’t just put up a picture of an empty UI — the user is going to notice that it’s not interactive and get really frustrated when her taps do nothing. But an app should not take that long to launch. When I was at Apple the goal was always “one bounce” — on a cold launch the app’s Dock icon should bounce only once, and by that time the app should be ready to go. That means one second or less. And in that second (or maybe two) the user is not going to immediately tap on something; her brain is going to be working on parsing the image of the UI, deciding where to tap first, moving her finger there... There’s no reason you can’t accomplish this. Admittedly a lot of iOS apps do take a long time to start up (especially games) but I suspect that’s mostly because they are dragging in giant 3rd party cross-platform runtime libraries and/or interpreters. People have been conditioned to expect games to take a long time to load, anyway. —Jens _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
