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

[From: Michael Wiktowy]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Heh, well if you don't care about marketing your
>  product/program/platform to its users, you definitely shouldn't follow
>  Apple.

Please don't put words in my mouth.
How exactly does putting an engineering-centric view first equate to
not caring about marketing? It clearly does not.
I would just rather application developers give the users a better
experience my actual performance gains rather than blatant
psychological manipulation.

>  _Actual_ performance. _Perceived_ performance will be improved, which
>  is what matters to anyone not thinking how the poor CPU is doing hard
>  work. What cannot be seen by users, does not exist to the users.

Actually ... I took a good look at the startup times of all the apps
that I have installed on my tablet (which is a good chunk of what is
available since I like checking out what is out there). The vast
majority of them show a loading banner immediately and a barebones UI
is less than 3 seconds. The only two that took an easily measurable
time to start without showing *anything* (including a banner) was
Erminig and Gnumeric and they both started up in about 6 seconds.

So it appears that some people's perception of startup slowness
problems do not match reality. This is with the N810 running OS2008.
The N800 running OS2008 will be similar. Running OS2007 on either the
770 or N800 is the only problem area ... and there already is a
solution for the N800. So this discussion should probably be narrowed
down to how can you make the 770 look like it is starting up faster.
Something I can see Nokia having zero interest in.

>  I suppose many of the open source projects around do just that. They
>  construct beautifully engineered but unimaginably crappy UI's.

You are displaying a pile of hyperbole here and slipping into the
tired falsehood that well engineered things look ugly. Don't forget
that UI design is as much an engineering principle as it is an
aesthetic one. While I agree that Apple does a great job at UI
innovation, the rest of the world in not a UI cestpit. There are
examples of crummy UI, sure. But maemo is not one of them. It could be
better but it is pretty good by any absolute standard.

>  If it was so easy to cut startup time to <3s, people probably would
>  have done it already. Since it hasn't happened, setting up smoke and
>  mirrors to entertain the user while loading would make *users* happier
>  (note: not the people who watch the CPU meter or even know what the
>  heck CPU is).

Well, I have news for you ... that <3s standard for showing a basic UI
has already been met (with the N800 and N810 running OS2008 at least).
So all your smoke and mirrors will likely impact the user perception
negatively since you'd be hard pressed to get a full screen fake UI
image up in significantly less time than that.

/Mike