On 03-Oct-2014 16:05, Johan Engelen wrote:
The problem is that Inkscape starts too slowly (for some people's taste anyway), and that people (me too) start another instance of Inkscape thinking that the first one is not starting. The proposed solution is a splash screen, to tell people to hang in there and wait a little.
Splash screens that consist of little spinning circles and the like are pretty much worthless. They show something is going on, but for all the end user knows it may go on for a very long time. An advancing status bar is a little better, since it describes visually that things are proceeding. Again though, the bar is rarely linear with time, so it might get up to 95% quickly and then take 5% for the last bit. (I cannot count the number of OS installs I have been through where a status bar stops at 99% for a long, frustrating time.) The approach I prefer is probably one most end users would not initially much care for: a small text box that scrolls a small number of lines up with "stage" status messages. Something along these lines (these stages are entirely made up):
00:00.00 Starting 00:00.10 UI initialized 00:00.20 Loading icons 00:01.23 Loading fonts 00:12.46 Loading widgets ... 01:56.32 Started
and it disappears at Started so quickly that nobody should ever be able to read that. The advantage of this is that the user can tell what the current stage is. Then they, or other developers, will complain to the developers that "inkscape is taking 11 seconds to get through 'Loading Widgets'", which tells us where the slow parts are and provides a stimulus to speed those parts up. When all the slow parts have been fixed the user (or installer for the next version) can change the default startup to
inkscape --nosplash
I fear though that in the case of Inkscape this approach might not be feasible because it may well be trying to do several things at once during startup. This is not very helpful:
00:00.00 Starting 01:56.32 UI initialized 01:56.32 Loading icons 01:56.32 Loading fonts 01:56.32 Loading widgets ... 01:56.32 Started
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech