Progress bars

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From: Leon Brocard
Subject: Progress bars
Date: 15:41 on 11 Sep 2003

There is so much I hate about progress bars that I don't quite know
where to begin.

First off, let's make the assumption that progress bars (or some sort
of progress display) might be useful. If something is going to take a
while, it might be useful to inform the user. Even better, you could
inform the user the expected time the whole process will take. Or the
expected time to the end, and where in the process you are. It just
makes sense. Programs like rsync which lack such progress indicators
should be shot[1].

A progress bar should have a bar. The bar should start at the left,
increase during the process, and get to the right. When it's got to
the right, the operation is complete. Some sort of ETA might be
nice. If this is an installer, the installer should quit. If there are
things to do after the progress bar, the programmer is stupid and they
should be included into the progress bar.

And about ETAs: let's not be too accurate, because you know some
foolish programmer will have an ETA that jumps from 2:01 to 2:13 and
back again as it is overly accurate. This is silly. Mac OS X has vague
ETAs, like "Under five minutes", "Under a minute". This is nice and
friendly.

I was installing a driver and utility disk for a digital camera the
other day. The primary installer really installed lots of little
installers which installed other things, most of which had a couple of
progress bars. Multiple progress bars are stupid. Roll them into
one. This installation process showed me 28 progress bars. 28! All I
wanted to know was if it was almost over and how long it would take,
not the details of every file of every package it was trying to
install. Bad programmer, no cookie!

Leon

[1] So rsync has a progress bar for a file. So what? I'm transferring
200k small files, and it fails to do anything useful for that
-- 
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
scribot.................................http://www.scribot.com/

... Oops. My brain just hit a bad sector

Progress bars Leon Brocard 15:41 on 11 Sep 2003
- Re: Progress bars Jody Belka 15:58 on 11 Sep 2003
- Yoz Grahame 16:22 on 11 Sep 2003
- Michael G Schwern 22:50 on 11 Sep 2003
  - too deep to show

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