On 3-10-2014 18:30, Niko Kiirala wrote:
Tue, 30 Sep 2014 01:40:38 +0200 Johan Engelen <jbc.engelen@...2592...> kirjoitti:
"If Inkscape needs a loading screen, then it's failing to load quickly enough and we should spend time on making inkscape faster instead"
This argument does not make sense to me. It is trivial to make a splash screen that pops up instantly and will only slow down Inkscape's boot time by milliseconds. I do not see how this minor piece of work would detract significantly from other development work. I'd love to see a splash screen.
I guess you're missing the point of that argument. It's not that a splash screen would be a major effort or that it would slow down Inkscape start.
The thing is: a splash screen is a crutch. It's sure nice to have if you really need one, but it's much better to not need it in the first place.
From your explanation, I am not missing the point of the argument. It's just that it fails to provide a solution for the problem at hand.
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. The "argument" argues that instead, we should make Inkscape faster. Of course we should. Who can disagree with that? But, how do we do that? How to solve the problem? A statement of the form "Inkscape is too X", is not magically solved with an answer of the form "we should make Inkscape not X". Anyone is very welcome to work on making Inkscape start faster. As Josh pointed out, experimental already starts faster than trunk (for me too). Until we get below 500 ms, say, we can have a splash screen. I see no harm in that. As soon as we can show below 1 sec startup time, we kill the splash screen.
Given the choice what to see within 500 ms of click on Inkscape icon, I'd really rather see the main Inkscape UI than a splash screen.
I would rather see a splash screen than a (probably one-minute-unresponsive) main screen. But that is just taste. If you manage to get Inkscape's UI showing within half a second, with a "Loading..." text/progressbar on it, that'd be fine for me too.
-Johan