[maemo-developers] Launch image to increase feeling of responsiveness (a la iPhone)

[From: Glen Ditchfield]

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> Reading the recently released iPhone SDK's Human Interface Guidelines
> document[1], I came across an interesting idea: every application has
> a launch image configured which is immediately displayed on launch to
> improve the user experience.
> ...
> I think this is a concept which would work well in Hildon: a PNG image 
> the size of an unmaximised window could be specified in the .desktop
> file, on selection of an application the Task Navigator would load and
> show that image immediately in a window titled the name of the
> application...

Long ago, Jef Raskin's "Canon Cat", a sort of word processing appliance,
used this idea.  The last thing the Cat did before shutting down was to
take a full screenshot and write it to disk, along with all of the other
dynamic state.  The first thing it did on start-up was to display the
screenshot, then it went about restoring the state and drawing the live
interface under the screenshot.  The Cat had a short boot time, so by the
time the user had seen and understood the screen display and decided what
to do next, the Cat was ready to accept user input.  The system's load
latency overlapped with the human's "think time".