
Splash screens == sloth  - kylehansen
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/02/splash-screens-sloth.html
======
JS_startup
I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office,
OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require
resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the
programmers lazy.

His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user
can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does
this when it boots up and it drives me insane -- if the OS or program isn't in
a usable state when you show it to me, _don't show it to me_

Loading speed is just one of a multitude of factors that come into play when
making software. According to this Adobe employee it should be the chief most
concern, even dominating other things like features, usability, UX, cost,
technological debt, etc.

~~~
mattmanser
Think of the 100s of millions or even billions of hours of unhappiness caused
by whatever utter wanker designed the windows update system. All that misery
waiting to go home to your actual _life_ but you can't because your laptop's
displaying 'Do not turn off or unplug your computer'. No, just sit here and
watch me. Or those times you accidentally opened Word or Photoshop or MySql
Workbench (god that's slow) or whatever. You made a mistake? Well fuck you.
I'm not listening to you, says your computer, I'm just going to ignore you for
a little bit.

That's why.

And they're not enormously complicated, paint opens instantly and has the same
UI. Word is little more than a glorified textbox. Programmatically all the
features make those programs enormously complex, but the actual common use of
the programs are simplicity itself.

~~~
keypusher
You think they put that notification there to annoy you? No, it's because of
possible data loss and/or system file corruption if you turn off the power
while the system files are being patched. Splash screens exist because the
program is loading. If you want the functionality of Paint, or Notepad, open
those instead. If you want Photoshop, you open Photoshop, and it takes a while
to load because it is gigantically complex. If you want it to load faster, buy
a new computer.

~~~
jiggy2011
Surely Windows updates are applied via some sort of transactional system that
can be rolled back and re-attempted if the process fails for whatever reason?

Having a power cut during a Windows update shouldn't result in a completely
trashed system.

~~~
pak
Surprisingly, NTFS does allow for transactions [1] and this feature is
implemented since Vista, while as far as I know, HFS+ on Macs has no
comparable feature. Therefore what you say may in fact be true.

I'm curious if cutting the power on a Mac while it's moving files into place
will break a software update, or if the whole package receipt mechanism
prevents that from occurring.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS>

~~~
keypusher
I'm not sure even transactional NTFS would protect you in this case. From the
wiki link:

 _Transactional NTFS is implemented on top of the Kernel Transaction Manager
(KTM), which is a Windows kernel component._

Because this is implemented on top of the kernel itself, if you have brought
down the kernel in order to update files within said kernel, you likely are
not going to be able to leverage the transactional rollback. You might able to
do a system restore, if you boot from CD, but breaking your kernel is not an
easily recoverable situation. I suspect there are actually safegaurds in the
update procedure which protect against this situation, but things can go wrong
and it is really not something you want to have to rely on.

~~~
jiggy2011
I was thinking more of having a transactional system within the update
software itself independent of anything on the filesystem.

Something like this:

1\. Download all compressed archives that are required for the update from the
update website and unzip somewhere.

2\. Check the package manifest and figure out which files need to be
changed/added/deleted.

3\. Write a flag somewhere on the boot drive that says the update process has
begun and which files will be altered.

4\. Make copies of all the files which will be changed.

5\. Work through the update process by modifying or overwriting the copied
files with the contents of the update archives.

6\. Temporarily suspend the scheduler so the update process is the only thing
running and release locks on all of the files which will be changed.

7\. Work through every file that needs to be changed and link the filesystem
reference from the old version to the new version whilst keeping a copy of the
old version.

8\. At every stage in 7 mark in a log which references have been updated.

9\. Mark a flag to indicate that the update process has been completed, either
resume the scheduler and re-instate locks or force a restart of the OS if
necessary.

When the system next starts up as part of the bootup process it can check if
both the transaction start and finish flags are set. If the start flag is set
but not the finish flag then it knows that an update failed so it can roll
back by re-linking to the old versions of every file (reading the logs to know
which files to re-link) and setting the start flag back to 0 so it can try
again.

If the update was successful then it can delete the old files if the disk
space is needed or keep them around in case there is an issue later which
required a restore.

In regards the kernel example, my Linux install actually keeps old versions of
the kernel on the system so that if a kernel update breaks something for
whatever reason it is still possible to boot the system from the previous
kernel. I imagine Windows and OSX do something like this , although possibly
more transparently.

Note: This is what I could think of off the top of my head, I'm sure it's not
a perfect way of doing it but it demonstrates the idea.

~~~
Nick_C
I don't know if it follows those exact steps, but in the last few months I had
several times a machine crash (flaky power supply) in the middle of various
Windows Updates and it always recovered pretty well. It looked to this
outsider like there was some sort of journalling going on.

------
Maro
This weekend the 3G mysteriously stopped working on my iPhone, so after months
of use, I rebooted it. Rebooting the iPhone takes 1+ minute, and there _is_ a
kind of splash screen shown during that time. The reason it appears
instantenous during normal use is that it doesn't actually boot or load, it
just turns the display back on. Also, many iOS apps actually have splash
screens, you just don't see them very often as they're usually already running
in the background (big apps like Facebook, and even small ones like PCalc Lite
or Quotes).

You can kind of achieve this with Windows + Adobe stuff too. Just don't quit
Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it
to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back
into main memory will also be much faster.

Of course the OP is right, Adobe stuff is bloatware and sucks. Fortunately for
non-pro designers, there are alternatives like Pixelmator and Paint.NET.

~~~
roadnottaken
I guess this is sort-of the idea behind OSX behavior where an App is running
with no open windows. They WANT you to leave everything running in the
background. As a longtime Windows user, I still find this confusing, but I
think they're trying to make everything appear to "load" instantly because
it's just always running... sort of like on a phone.

~~~
why-el
+1. I find that extremely annoying. Some times I reopen a window of preview
let's say just to close the whole program.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> Some times I reopen a window of preview let's say just to close the whole
> program.

I do not understand what you are saying. Can you elaborate?

~~~
why-el
Here is a scenario, and my mac is a month old, so maybe I am borrowing heavily
from Ubuntu and MS experiences. When I am reading two pdfs, and then close
one, it makes sense for the preview menu to stay on because I am reading the
second pdf, but when I close the second, what reason is there for preview menu
to stay up?

Edit: As to my original comment, when I switch to another app, preview stays
open, but up to now I don't know how to close it because I can't get the menu
to appear without a pdf or something using it, that's why I reopen a document,
forcing the menu to show up, then close the app.

~~~
pavel_lishin
There's lots of reasons for the menu to stay open; the simplest example is
clicking File, then Open, to open a new file.

As far as the menu disappearing when you close both documents, that's
confusing and directly contradicts what you typed earlier. I can open
Preview.app, and it'll just show me the menu. I can close it by alt-tabbing to
it and hitting Cmd-Q - no windows required.

------
feralchimp
Boo and/or hiss. If you hate splash screens, use simpler tools or get more
RAM. When Photoshop finishes loading, it's ready to kick ass. The Finder, on
the other hand, taunts with its almost-readiness. Faking readiness is far
worse than setting and honoring expectations.

~~~
lusr
Agreed. If you're seeing that Photoshop splash screen regularly you simply
don't have enough RAM. I keep my PC running for weeks on end and seldom close
anything. With 12GB of RAM (which costs nothing) I almost never run out of RAM
and every application is cached in RAM, so if I DO happen to close an
application then reopening it is extremely fast. I shutdown my PC for the
first time in weeks last night, and that was only because I was wary of the
massive thunderstorm getting through my lightning protector. I don't actually
understand why people shut their PCs down at all to be honest.

~~~
eru
Saves on electricity, and noise. Though suspend to RAM does that, too.

~~~
lusr
Assuming this hardware monitor is reasonably accurate, my hyperthreaded quad
core i7 chows 145W when I'm _really_ busy, which with my 80+ Corsair HX750W
means I'm not eating more than 2 100W lightbulbs. I seldom play games any more
so rarely use more than that. And that's when I'm doing serious number
crunching. Since I'm only working at home about 4-5 hours/day during the week
and maybe 2-3 that on weekend days, I really don't see electricity as much of
an expense compared to time wasted rebooting and reopening all my work to
where I last left it.

~~~
eru
Yes. I don't want to claim that rebooting still makes sense. But old habits
die hard.

------
zoul
I hate Adobe software with passion.

I used to love Macromedia Fireworks, so that I bought a copy of Fireworks
after Adobe acquired Macromedia. I had to jump through some crazy hoops to
prove that I did not steal the product, and that was nothing compared to what
I had to do after buying a new computer – it turns out that I was supposed to
unactivate the product on the old one and then activate on the new one. This
is not what you do to your customers. I don’t even want to start on the issue
of software quality or customer service (I once did the mistake of trying to
report an i13n issue with my copy of Fireworks).

I swore there’s not going to be any software by Adobe on my computer anymore,
and I even disabled Flash in my primary browser. I am lucky that I can do with
the new wave of Mac graphics editors like Pixelmator. I was so happy paying
for that product on the Mac App Store, getting a copy and _doing nothing else_
that would require it to work. I was so happy that it starts immediately, that
is has a decent UI. It’s not feature complete, it’s got its own bugs, but it’s
a software and experience I am willing to pay for. Unlike Adobe. (Which is a
company I once liked, being a typography geek and typesetting our school
magazine in an old copy of PageMaker.)

~~~
ssharp
Do you think Pixelmator is a good replacement for Fireworks? Fireworks has
been really great at allowing me to quickly mock-up different web layout
concepts without having to write any HTML code. I know some are in the
"concept with HTML camp", but I've found Fireworks to be so much faster. I've
never bothered too much with Photoshop since Fireworks did 90% of what I
wanted.

I'm like many, however, in grumbling about how crappy Fireworks has gotten (at
least on OSX, not sure about Windows) and am to the point that I'm ready to
move on.

~~~
zoul
I have moved from webdesign so that I no longer need the design features I
admired on Fireworks. What I liked most about Fireworks was the blend between
the vector and bitmap graphics, and I don’t think that Pixelmator is getting
anywhere close to that. But it’s worth to take a look. Also try out Acorn
(<http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/>). I think both have a free evaluation.

~~~
J3L2404
Seconded for Acorn. A really solid program.

------
alex_c
_A splash screen basically tells me, in very clear-cut terms, that my time is
worth nothing whatsoever. It's a fresh reminder that users' needs don't count
as much as programmer convenience does._

So... how much IS your time worth? How much extra would you be willing to pay
for instantly-responsive applications? Programmer time isn't free, either.

~~~
davedx
Why should users have to pay extra??

The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed,
because speed = $$$.

The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so
slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity?

There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and
Photoshop.

~~~
alex_c
Someone has to pay. Whether it's a higher price for users, less time spent on
other features, or lower profits for the company, the effort has to come from
somewhere.

I don't disagree that responsiveness and user experience are important, but
Basecamp is a webapp. Responsiveness for the most common tasks is a higher
priority than the one-time cost at start-up.

I'm not sure anyone is "throwing away their userbase"... How many people stop
using Photoshop because it takes too long to start? Now, Acrobat Reader on the
other hand...

~~~
davedx
I don't understand why everyone thinks the fact Basecamp is a webapp is
important.

As you say, responsiveness and user experience are important, and 37 Signals
decided it was worth investing a significant amount in. Adobe have decided,
over the years, that it is not.

~~~
alex_c
Because comparing app loading time to website page load times is meaningless.

A better comparison are common tasks in Photoshop, like selection, fill, layer
operations, filters, etc. - things that are done constantly while using the
application. I don't have any point of reference, but they feel pretty
responsive to me. If the article was making a case that Adobe has been
neglecting optimization for common operations, then bringing up Basecamp or
other webapps would be relevant.

I'm not sure how to explain it more clearly than that.

------
luser001
I ranted about this a few days ago. My favorite idiocy on Windows is their
background "optimization" of .Net binaries.

[https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412...](https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412838.aspx?Redirected=true)

This service appears to perform a large number of I/O requests (probably
reading/writing a large number of small files). It will totally consume the
disk seek capacity, massively slowing down every other program that is also
doing disk I/O (e.g., freezing Firefox awesomebar searches).

The programmers at the linked blog congratulate themselves on how this mayhem
lasts only 10 minutes on a typical computer.

Note: I do not have an SSD. :( This and other idiocies will force me to get
one next time.

~~~
noblethrasher
But the situation you describe should only happen once for each time you
install or update what is a relatively major component of the OS.

~~~
luser001
Fair enough. This occurs roughly once in two months when I least expect it.

But the point is that with just a bit more attention to detail, they could
have made this process utterly unobtrusive: don't process more than once file
per second, if you want want to build in heuristics to infer the disk seek
bandwidth.

Btw, Microsoft Security Essentials may be doing things like this. For me, it
is totally not noticeable.

------
zokier
I for one prefer seeing splash screen for couple of seconds[1] rather than
having laggy/half-functional UI appear instantly. Actually I'm more annoyed by
Windows login, which shows desktop early while it's still starting up
background apps, and thus being unusably slow.

And the comparisons to mobile devices are just ridiculous. At least in my use,
I'd estimate that on average apps on my desktop launch much more quickly than
on my Android phone. And I challenge anyone to find a smartphone that boots up
faster than a fresh Windows 7 install on a SSD (or even on a regular HDD).

[1] I just timed: Photoshop 5 seconds, Word 2 seconds, both from warm caches.
And that's with a 4 year old budget laptop.

------
orthecreedence
Whether or not the programmers of Photoshop can make their app run faster, I
have to say it's pretty sad that waiting 10 seconds is worth whining about. I
understand this is unacceptable for a web app's page load time, but for a
desktop app that loads an enormous amount of resources _once_ before letting
you use it seems acceptable to me.

I think the real problem is that we are all so incredibly spoiled that waiting
10s is a _huge inconvenience_. I'm not saying it's not annoying. I don't like
it either... that squirming feeling you get when you expect something to be
fast and it isn't. But, like, get over it.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most important issue in the cosmos,
waiting 10 seconds for an app to load would be about
0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 (if that). Perhaps there are more
important things to write about.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is just an extreme example of so called 'first world problems'.

------
munin
>When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of
like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.

what phone does he use? every phone that I know of takes at least two minutes
to come up from a cold start, and has for the last ten years...

~~~
untog
Yeah, he's comparing two entirely different things. The phone is instant when
turning the display on. My laptop is near-instant when resuming from sleep.
Neither are instant at actually booting up.

~~~
MichaelApproved
And the phone is working off a fast flash drive while the PC is using a slow
mechanical drive.

------
jakeonthemove
What's the big deal? Showing a splash screen for less than 5 seconds (oh yeah,
get an SSD) until everything initializes is better than opening a non-
functioning UI ("the cloud" is not a solution - what are you going to do when
your connection goes bad?). It would be nice to not have it, but for such a
bloated program as Photoshop or After Effects, it's pretty much expected...

~~~
leviathant
r: "get an SSD" - I recently upgraded my computer at work, and Photoshop CS3
(which does more than enough for my purposes) opens up in under 1 second.
After a day of using this computer with an SSD as the primary hard drive, I
finally pulled the trigger and ordered one for my desktop at home. Easily
added years of usable life to the computer I bought new in 2008.

------
MikeCapone
"Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the
computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then
swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster."

My experience in OS X is that Photoshop has to be restarted very frequently or
it just eats up more and more memory until it uses it all. Seems like bad
memory management.

~~~
jiggy2011
That's possibly just because there is no other contention for the memory. By
and large it is the OS that is broadly responsible for memory management, the
OS hands out pages of memory to programs and it's upto the programs as to how
they use them.

If you have photoshop running and using a lot of RAM it is likely that were
you to run another application the RAM usage of photoshop would drop to
accommodate the other program as the OS will simply drop some of photoshop's
pages and let the other program use them.

There is not really any performance hit from doing this since any page that is
not "dirty" (i.e has not been written to) which will be basically any pages
containing program code does not need to be swapped back to disk.

If you are concerned you should find a way to measure the quantity of IO going
on in the swap area since heavy swap IO will be the best indicator that you
either need more memory or something is not as it should be.

For example I run a server that is often at 70% or so of RAM usage but has
only swapped something like 10MB of data in the last month.

------
d4nt
The title made it seem like this was going to be more of an whistle-blowing
blog post by an insider.

Nevertheless, this kind of rant is interesting in so far as it points to what
I think a growing momentum behind the UNIX philosophy. What I mean by that is:
small programs that do one thing well and interoperate with others.

I wonder whether the underlying cause of this shift in thinking is the
levelling off of CPU cycle speeds. Time was when the performance of something
like Photoshop or Office would just prompt you to buy a better computer.
People would assume their computer had gotten old or out of date. Now that
getting new hardware doesn't magically fix things people are asking why
certain things take so long and comparing programs' performance.

------
oofoe
A lot of people here seem to think that complaining about a five to six second
start time is just whining. I believe you're wrong -- it is a legitimate and
valid complaint and here's why:

Most software can't run for very long. A lot of high-end software can be
/very/ unstable (hello, Maya! ;-). The user is not just starting that software
once at the beginning of the day for a long productive day of work, they are
all to often starting it again after a crash. Or after they shut it down to
get enough RAM to run Excel. Or after rebooting Windows for /another/
mandatory update from IT.

I once had to restart a particular high-end compositing package thirty times
in an hour. Twenty seconds of the average two minutes were spent staring at
the splash screen. But I had to do it, because I needed thirty frames rendered
and a particular plugin crashed after running one frame.

The user is not starting your software to admire your credits or the clever
graphic design of your logo. They are starting your software to /use/ it get a
job done, a job that they have in mind to do and any distraction at all (even
a harmless splash screen) is a new stumbling block on their way to resuming
their task.

I heard of a study done back in the mainframe days that determined that
anything that took less than two seconds felt instantaneous to the user.
However, anything longer (even five seconds!) took "forever". In my years of
programming, I have found nothing to disprove this (possibly) apocryphal
conclusion.

Your user's time is valuable. Your user's mental state and flow are valuable.
As programmers on Hacker News, we all know about concentration and flow,
right? Extend your users the same courtesy you expect from your tools. Help
them keep things going, don't break their rhythm and don't let them lose
context.

~~~
jiggy2011
If I was using some software and it was so unstable that I had to restart it
over-and-over again I'd conclude that there was either something horribly
wrong with my setup somewhere in which case I'd try and resolve it or that the
software was simply a POS and I would stop using it.

I very rarely have program crashes these days and when I do it is usually down
to either a failing hard disk or that I am using something version 0.x of
something.

I do agree to an extent about Windows updates though , these do tend to nark
me (especially the nag screens). Unless it's patching something that would
allow privileged remote code execution onto my box _right now_ it can wait.

Any company that was genuinely worried about their staff losing productivity
due to slow program loads would just install SSDs onto all their computers,
afterall this is what we at HN generally advocate.

What I find somewhat annoying though is software that has a lot of "visual
effects" such as windows that fade in and out where you can't interact with
the program until the effect has completed. This is only annoying though if it
would have been instant if the effect was not there.

------
nitid_name
I'm not sure I'm a big fan of what it would take to fix this. Namely, "speed
loaders" that sit in memory and eat up RAM. I've already seen what adobe's PDF
speed loader can do on a system.

Frankly, I'll manage my applications myself.

Are you tired of waiting for Photoshop to launch? You might want to try
leaving it open...

------
rauljara
Louis CK has a fantastic rant about people complaining about technology being
too slow (and technology, in general). It helped to put my own rage in
perspective. I find myself getting less pissed at technology since watching
it, and I kind of hope that lasts.

(NSFW)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&feature=related)

~~~
billjings
I love Louis CK as much as the next guy, but he's not a technologist, and his
perspective is not helpful to us in this context. In life, sure - have
patience. Keep it in perspective. Appreciate what you have, and don't rage
against things you can't change.

This rant is not about life, though, it is about what makes for good and bad
software. Which happens to be what we do for a living. In the grand scheme of
things, we're all dead, and software doesn't matter. While we're here, though,
it's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about the things that bug us
about it. It's our job to make this little area of the universe better. I
think taking that seriously is a good thing.

~~~
rauljara
Upvoted, because that was well said, and because I'll fully admit that CK's
rant is not quite a proper response to the OP.

But I do think that the original rant was clearly someone who let his rage
batter the rational part of his brain into a pulp. He mentions things like
that the iPhone experience is now what constitutes "minimally usable". Except
that no PC (mac or otherwise) comes close to that level of experience and
people are still using/buying them, so clearly he has a different definition
of minimally usable than a sane person. He's also so annoyed at having to wait
that he proposes worse solutions than the wait itself (a fake UI, that still
logs actions; I foresee way more frustration from that than having to look at
a splash image).

Yeah, there's a lot of room to improve load times, and a well reasoned blog
post on that would have been great. But when someone is ballistic to the point
that they can't think straight anymore - I think a little comedic appeal to
perspective isn't entirely out of line.

------
jarrett
The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in
terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an
app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in
2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in
2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And
I'm sure that the binaries for importing camera raw images don't come anywhere
close to accounting for all the bloat in that time.)

So, my computers have gotten better and better, while the demands I place on
them have remained basically constant, yet boot time stays the same. The only
thing I can think to blame is bloat.

~~~
jiggy2011
I imagine load time hasn't improved so much because that's not really what
they are optimising for.

You could of course still run an old version of Photoshop on a modern PC if
startup time is really that important to you.

I think it would be interesting to compare performance of Photoshop CS5 with
Photoshop 6 (the first version I used) on a modern PC.

I would expect of course that PS6 would start up almost instantly whereas CS5
would take a few seconds. However it would be interesting to also take a
relatively large image file of the sort of size that a graphics designer might
actually work with (let's say 500MB or so) and apply a bunch of the same
filters across the whole image (in such a way as to produce an identical
result) on the same computer and time them both.

My guess would be that CS5 would be significantly faster which may be partly
due to optimisations made at load time. Not sure if anybody has actually
measured something like this though?

------
stdbrouw
As much as I hate bloat and love svelte web apps that do just what I need and
nothing more... I think we also need to accept that some people in some fields
of work do pretty advanced stuff, and need pretty advanced software to do that
stuff.

Adobe InDesign in particular is a huge piece of software with tons of config
options and obscure features and what-not, but I've never ever found a feature
that made me think "what kind of useless, bloated bullshit is this?" I think
Adobe teams fight very hard against bloat, but their business is based around
power users and that just leads to a different kind of software.

------
shocks
This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life,
where you have 16 milliseconds to do _everything_ and it pays to be smart, use
clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry
(he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company
producing software for the film industry.

It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long
time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the
country chasing a _real_ programming job again...

~~~
jiggy2011
My experience with games software is that it typically has much longer loading
times than other software.

I think this is justified though because what matters in a game is the
perceived performance while the game is actually in operation.

If when I load a game it spends an extra 10 seconds optimising quadtrees &
shaders etc to give me faster game performance and enable 16 millisecond
latencies then it is overall worth doing, since trying to load stuff off the
disk while I am actually playing would harm the experience.

I imagine photoshop developers do something similar.

------
yummyfajitas
I don't use photoshop, but my emacs takes 3-5 sec to boot up.

So lets see. Supposing I use emacs for 3 hours, 5 seconds is precisely 0.04%
of the time I spent using it. I'd prefer if the emacs dev team focuses on new
features for me to use during the other 99.96% of the time I spend using it.

Iphone/Android apps are fast because they need to be. Often you use them for
30sec-5 min. On a 30 second use, 5 seconds is 16% of the time you spend using
the app.

------
jsz0
With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I
often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for
weeks at a time. There's not much downside in doing this besides some extra
clutter in your dock/taskbar. For any fairly modern machine an upgrade to SSD
+ 8GB of RAM will mostly solve the problem. That's about $250-$300 to avoid
the problem almost entirely. I feel like this is a byproduct of the race to
the bottom of PCs over the last 5 years or so. Just because you _can_ buy a
$500 computer with a spinning disk and 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you _should_
buy it. There are trade-offs to consider.

Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a
developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and
relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10
second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants
2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case
with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.

------
peteboyd
The video game industry has the same issue. Initial bloat screens. A lot.

Skyrim for instance, it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to load the initial
screen, which is just the logo of Bethesda. You know what is on the initial
screen. A button for me to click that says Start. Once I click that button,
then I have to hit Continue for it to load the last save point. Then another
30 seconds to 1 minute to load my game/map point.

So basically, two actions and over a minute later, I am finally in the game. A
much easier thing would be to just load my last save/map point. I can turn on
the console, and know to come back in a minute. Just have it paused until I am
ready to play. If I wanted to say restart the entire game, I could go into the
menu system from there.

I find this the case on almost all games. FIFA, Madden, Bad Company, Call of
Duty. Just start the game I played last. If I regularly play online, go and
find me a server automatically. Auto load my game, unless I hold down the
start button or some other button that would then default to the menu.

I don't care that Bethesda or EA made my game, I just want to play.

~~~
talmand
Keep in mind that a large amount of the time you see a splash screen (or five)
in a game it's not because of loading, it's because of marketing.

------
readme
I suppose this is a good place to mention that I wasted 2 hours of my day
zeroing my MBR because of Adobe. Apparently Photoshop installs some DRM crap
on it.

Proof: [http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-
CS4-VERSION/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-
CS4-VERSION/dp/B001EUDGO2)

Proof: <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254>

I will not be using an Adobe product other than Flash again. I would ditch
Flash as well, but last time I checked, gnash was not good enough to replace
it yet. That's not an issue though. I'll just wait for HTML5 to kill it.

------
tjoff
_Imagine if your phone or iPad took as long to boot as a Windows laptop. Would
you use it? Would it be usable?_

My android phone (Nexus S) takes longer than my 6 year old Windows laptop do
(sure, it's updated with an SSD but even without it would be a close call), my
mothers tablet isn't faster either. Solution? I never turn either off. Problem
solved.

Hibernate for longer sessions, sleep if battery isn't important and I know I
will use it for the next few days.

On my workstation I never turn off heavy applications anyway. On my laptop I'm
limited by my 32 bit Win7 OS so that's a burden, but I can work with it. The 8
GB I have in my workstation isn't ideal either, tempted to get a 24 or 32 GB
machine but probably can't justify replacing the current machine just yet. I
see no reason to get less RAM on a new setup though.

Also I really appreciate having the whole application ready. Having parts of
it lazy-load can be way more agonizing than a slow boot. And with an SSD you
don't have to wait long anyway, I always tend to fiddle with other windows
during the boot so I'm not that annoyed. The splash screen itself can be
annoying if it claims window focus or is just in the way but they exist for a
reason. There should something telling me that the application is booting
(firing up a task manager doesn't count), I agree that there are less
obtrusive ways for this than a splash screen though and for that OS developers
should be blamed for not realizing this.

------
jiggy2011
My computer is pretty responsive, at least as much as my smartphone is and I'm
not running anything special (No SSD, 4GB of RAM and an older model of quad
core).

Ok, I wait maybe 2-3 minutes for the computer to start (not even that if I
just put it to sleep instead of turning it off). I can work for ~8-10 hours so
those minutes aren't a big deal.

There are a few programs that are particularly slow to start (eclipse, steam,
openoffice) but that's mostly just because there is a lot of code to load and
I'm sure a comparable application for a smartphone would be just as slow.

I do run Linux most of the time though so there is probably a bias there
towards smaller non-monolithic programs there and not having registry bloat
helps.

However I still remember the days of Windows 98 and how horribly slow
everything was back then on anything apart from a freshly installed machine
and having to wait a full minute for Office 97 to start, we've come a long way
since those days. I can't see it taking long before every PC comes with an SSD
drive (which is probably part of the reason smartphones seem responsive as
well as having a well warmed cache).

As for doing something like running a cloud instance of the program and then
somehow syncing back to the desktop app seemlessly, that seems like it would
add such an insane level of extra complexity and problems which is exactly
what he seems to be against.

------
easterisle
Many people here are talking about how iOS works vs a desktop OS and that's
the big difference - but its not about the SSD. If you have a high powered
computer then its no problem to leave the adobe suite running and then just
grab it from the task bar and get to work. The issue is that most people don't
have high powered computers, at least powerful enough to run photoshop
constantly while doing other things (HD videos, netflix, chrome+firefox, etc….
non work things). Adobe and other big software companies are going to continue
to push the envelope no matter how fast our computers get in terms of resource
use.

Has photoshop gotten faster in our lifetimes? No! It just wants more and more
resources with every release. So what is the difference between how apps
behave on iOS and how they behave on the desktop? Backgrounding. Very very few
apps (ableton live is one that has some "freeze" type features) don't have any
way for you to shut down portions of the app or put the app to sleep so that
you can start it up quickly. On iOS this is how apps are expected to behave,
and it shows.

But, even if Apple did bring backgrounding to the desktop, I imagine Adobe
would be one of the last to support it - and I only say this because of my
previous personal experience with Adobe products like Flex, LCCS, etc…

I just thank code I'm not a designer...

~~~
jiggy2011
I would say that overall modern versions of photoshop do feel faster than
older ones.

Of course photoshop is intended for professional designers with reasonably
high end computers, it was never intended for the use case of somebody using a
netbook to touch up a few photos as there are other programs for that.

As technology has improved people will expect more from designers so they need
more powerful tools optimised for working with large file sizes etc so Adobe
are going to expend more effort maximising performance on higher end modern
workstations then they are making sure it loads quickly on a five year old
netbook.

Just because every teenager wants to use pirate CS4 to tack together a logo
for their band does not mean that is what adobe should optimise for.

------
glfomfn
What is so hard for people to understand ? Photoshop needs time to load,
because that time is quite significant they give you some kind of feedback to
let you know that 'hey the damn thing is loading, please wait', what's so bad
with that? what would the alternative be?

The title starting with "Adobe employee" tries to make it sound like its a
significant opinion regarding the matter, the author of the article doesn't
seem to be a programmer or holding a position that deals with the process of
making a program, what's even worst is the fact that he is completely clueless
regarding the matter, he suggest "e.g., show a UI right away and let an
instance of the program in the cloud operate against my gestures, until the
local copy boots fully and can re-sync with me", seriously ??? I started
wondering if i am being trolled at that point.

It takes 4 seconds to do a cold start of Photoshop on my laptop (which isn't a
top notch laptop), on an older computer and with previous versions of
Photoshop it would take 10-15seconds which would still be fine, the process
doesn't block me from doing something else in the mean time.

------
aycangulez
I still use Photoshop 6.0 circa 1999. It loads in a few seconds max, and it
has all the core functionality necessary for web graphics work. In fact, even
PS 5.5 would do fine because it was the first version that supported Save for
Web.

If you are using the latest version of Photoshop for web work only, you are
wasting time and money for tons of features you don't really need.

~~~
jiggy2011
Agree, I don't think Adobe has ever really positioned PS as a web tool I
always thought of it more as something for people to process _photos_ with,
including huge photo files which are intended for billboards etc.

------
dgallagher
I was hoping Adobe would patch Photoshop CS4 on OSX Lion so it stops crashing
when quitting, and then hanging indefinitely if you try to re-launch it again
without rebooting first. It's the most expensive software I've ever purchased
which doesn't know how to [NSApp terminate:nil]; properly.

------
Too
They could at least display "tip of the day" or hotkeys while you are waiting
to make the waiting time at least a bit productive. Why don't programs have
this today? Most old programs had this but after starting up. Displaying it
while the program is loading would be much smarter.

------
rwmj
Every, I'd say, 6 months or so, someone on the qemu mailing list posts a patch
to add a splash screen to qemu.

I don't understand why people persist in this:

(1) Most hypervisor start-up screens aren't even seen by most users.

(2) Spend that time and effort making the boot faster, not slowing it down
with utterly useless stuff!

------
darrikmazey
While as a programmer I understand that perhaps this load time could be
improved, and maybe splash screens are a lazy solution, but I wonder if it
warrants this level of anger. Even assuming a generous 5 minute load time on
photoshop (I don't know as I don't use it, but I doubt it's that much), and
that you reload twice a day (once at the beginning of the day and maybe once
after lunch), and you use it every weekday of the year, that's still less than
0.5% of your year.

I'm not saying losing 43 hours of your life per year is insignificant, but a
proportional response seems appropriate. You in all likelihood spend more time
waiting at red lights.

~~~
nknight
He wrote a rant on his blog, he didn't kill anyone. What exactly would be
"proportional"? Never speaking a word when something annoys you?

------
varelse
5-10 seconds? This guy is complaining about 5-10 seconds?

I hate bloatware. I despise behavior like the sloth and neglect Microsoft
inflicted on Windows XP once Vista shipped and I loathe the abandonment of
gingerbread phones like my late Droid G1 (unaffectionately nicknamed "the
brick" in its final days) by Google once they entered the crunch phase for
ICS, but 5 to 10 seconds?!?!?!?

Get a grip... If an app has any mandatory online component whatsoever (not
that photoshop does), its boot time is unavoidably non-deterministic. Good
luck fixing that (not that there's any excuse for avoiding latency that _can_
be avoided)...

------
tambourine_man
In all fairness, Photoshop startup time did get _a lot_ faster at version 10
(CS3), when they changed the type system to load only when needed.

But yes, there is still a long way to go. I don't think we need iOS like hacks
such as showing a PNG of the GUI to trick you into thinking loading is done.
This solution has its own set of issues (responsiveness, not precisely
matching your previous state in case of crash, etc). It's x1000 faster than my
phone, we can do better.

Modularizing, as shown above, is hard, but probably the best way to go. As
programs grown to the size of a small OS, they should be treated as such.

------
podman
Photoshop CS5 took roughly 4 seconds to start on my MBA. Is this guy seriously
complaining about 4 seconds? Several popular iOS (and I'm sure there are some
on Android as well) take longer than that to load...

~~~
kamjam
Agreed, about the same on my machine. It's kind of expected. On my old machine
I would just start Photoshop and go make a cup of tea. Or switch windows and
carry on with something else. But I rarely use Photoshop... If you are doing
this day in, day out then I think it justifies more RAM and/or an SSD.

------
Lockyy
What I find interesting is a story about Firefox Mobile. It used to get
complaints about it being slow to load and that it needed to be sped up. The
solution to this was that during load the browser would display an image of
the browser as it is when loaded instead of just a black screen as it
previously had. Complaints about slow loading screens decreased dramatically.
So yeah, I'll be keeping this sort of thing in mind. This was all relayed to
me from someone who attended the Firefox Mobile talk at FOSDEM.

------
davesims
OP has a point. Not a f*cing important point, but a point. UIs can and should
be faster, Adobe and MS are slow to catch on with current user expectations,
and splash screens are annoying relics of a bygone era of bloated desktop UIs.

Agreed.

But in the end, to me it's just one more instance of Everything's Amazing and
Nobody's Happy.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

I guess I just don't get the tone. Why the righteous indignation? This not
Human Rights we're talking about, it's software.

~~~
diggum
Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they
provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading
any necessary libraries.

I'm also at Adobe and my team recently performed a ground-up re-write of our
application. Minimizing start-up time was a high priority item and we did as
much as we could to reduce it, but file importers/exporters, codecs, and some
plug-ins need to be validated and loaded at some point - would you rather have
these costs as one-time, up-front fees or scattered throughout the application
as a thousand tiny cuts every time you open some menu command or function that
requires these libraries?

But even so, professional desktop applications are not the same as lightweight
mobile apps which tend to perform a limited set of tasks through a specific
workflow. To compare the two is unfair and and bit clueless. And he brings up
OS startup time, as if it doesn't take a LONG time for my Android or iOS
devices to boot up - and they have less excuses as the hardware is pretty
standard and fixed unlike my desktop machines.

I think his rant about wasted time is valid, but misguided. There's more time
wasted navigating non-intuitive interfaces or poorly laid-out common controls.
There a lot more time wasted when an application you rely on to do your job
doesn't offer the functionality or freedom of workflow to accomplish what you
need.

~~~
pslam
> Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they
> provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is
> loading any necessary libraries.

How is that useful to a user? How many users even know what a "library" is? It
might as well have a status bar announcing "Doing TECH thing 1 of 50...."

It seems to me that a splash screen is just a diversion: showing the user just
how much Really Important Stuff it's doing hides the fact that they're
basically being told to Please Wait. You're trying to make it look exciting,
when the truth is it's just getting in the way.

It might as well just splash with "PLEASE WAIT" with no progress bar and no
status. It has the same utility.

~~~
jiggy2011
A progress bar at least let's you know that the software hasn't crashed or got
stuck in an infinite loop.

------
jnorthrop
I wonder how Kas Thomas feels about the credit roll that occurs at the start
of a movie? You know the one where they show the logo of the movie studio,
then the production company, then the producer, editor, et al.

I see the software splash screen in the same light. It is giving credit to
those who have put it together. Now, obviously entertainment is different then
a work application, but many of us feel that software is art, just like a
movie and that if someone wants to do a credit role then they should.

~~~
smacktoward
That's an example that proves the opposite of your point.

You may notice if you watch some older movies (pre-1950s, mostly) that they
used to run the ENTIRE credits list at the start of the film. The WHOLE THING.
Not just the credits you see at the beginning today, but also all the ones
that today are listed at the END of the movie, too. The copyright notices for
all the songs they used, the logos for their camera and film providers, the
names of all the gaffers and best boys and Assistants To Mr. Bigshot... you
had to sit through them all before the movie got underway.

They don't do that anymore. Today only a very small number of Very Important
People get credited before the start of the movie. Everyone else gets shunted
to the end. Why? The answer is TV. When TV came along and movies started
getting shown there, they no longer had a captive audience. The audience could
now change the channel if they weren't being entertained -- which meant that
there was pressure on the filmmakers to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE. So they
moved nearly all the credits to run after the film, rather than before.

That was a bit of a blow to all those other folks, of course, since credits at
the end of a movie are credits nobody reads -- they're too busy leaving the
theater or changing the channel. But it was necessary to conform to the
audience's desire that they GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE.

Which is Thomas' point: users' expectations are changing. Used to be that it
didn't matter that much if your app was slow to load, because users didn't
expect it to be fast. But the proliferation of mobile devices and lightweight
apps is changing those expectations. So if you care about your users and want
to hold on to them, it behooves you to GET ON WITH THE DAMN APPLICATION.

~~~
Splines
Thanks for sharing that, I learned something new today already :).

You can see the progression even over the last 10-20 years. We used to see the
title of the movie, and then a few minutes of scenery with the actor's names
on them. These days it's not uncommon for the movie to start almost
immediately with the credits integrated into various background elements.

~~~
smacktoward
Yeah, as audiences' attention spans get ever shorter the pressure to GET ON
WITH THE DAMN MOVIE gets ever higher, so filmmakers are always looking for
ways to pare down the length of the opening credits or to present them in a
way that also starts the story moving.

The same evolution has been underway for a couple of decades now with TV
shows. Until the early 1990s it was commonplace for TV sitcoms to have a full
opening credits reel, complete with a theme song just for that show. Think of
the opening of _Mary Tyler Moore_ [1] from back in the '70s, for instance, or
_Cheers_ [2] from the '80s; they both became iconic representations of those
shows.

These intros helped set the tone of the show that followed them. But they
generally took a full minute to run, and as the universe of options provided
by cable expanded and remote controls became inexpensive, waiting that extra
minute for the show to start began to turn off viewers. The push began to GET
ON WITH THE DAMN SHOW, and so the traditional musical opening first shrank,
then disappeared altogether. Today's openings run much shorter -- 25 seconds
max -- and usually include just a couple of title cards and a musical snippet.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m4-Te1m7fY>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8ljNobUys>

------
marquis
Network-reliant apps should check for connectivity during loading, this can
take a few seconds to verify everything. Would he rather the app doesn't do
any environment validation and present errors when trying to run specific
tasks? Can you imagine, working on a complex document only to find out when
saving that you don't have enough disk space or your network connection isn't
valid. Splash-screens are an important time to determine whether everything is
there that you need to do.

------
gavanwoolery
Photoshop really is not _that_ complex - you could write a photoshop clone
that would load in under a second, easily. But it loads all sorts of stuff you
do not need up front - many fonts, textures, drivers for scanners, cameras,
and so forth. I think the real problem is that Adobe seems to keep patching an
already bloated code base - I think if they started fresh they could redesign
it more efficiently...just my humble opinion...

~~~
jiggy2011
I think it would be difficult to write a photoshop clone that loads in under a
second and provides the same level of performance when dealing with advanced
filters on huge images with hundreds of layers.

Anyway I doubt that all of that stuff is loaded at startup anyway.

------
johnohara
Splash screens are leftovers from the old-old days of text-based computing
when you had to mask the fact that the program being loaded was going to take
awhile (>30 secs).

Hardware, software, network, total users, i/o, it didn't matter, it was better
to say something than let users sit there at a terminal thinking nothing's
happening.

Or worse, tell their boss the "system's down again."

No excuse for them today. They just say "big app", it's gonna be awhile.

------
codesuela
when I read this I instantaneously thought about this rant from Louis CK
[Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy]
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

Linux Mint and Windows 7 take 10 seconds to boot on my laptop with a SSD.
That's amazing. Just a few months ago I would go make a sandwich while my PC
would boot. If you have a problem with splash screens alt tab to the browser
of your choice. If you think your PC boots to slow take out your smartphone
and play with it. This is not to say developers should be wasteful with users
time. Especially web developers know how import page speed is. But it's a
complex program just give it a few SECONDS.

Also one should mention Steam (the game distribution platform). If you are
bored in between rounds you just bring up the steam panel and use the embedded
browser to browse the web or chat with friends. But those at times minute long
delays. Sure you could embed a email client in the OS the comes up long before
the main GUI is loaded but you wont get to read much in 10 seconds.

------
ec429
Solution: don't use monolithic applications with bloated GUIs. Instead, use
small, simple tools, driven from the command line where possible. If the
problem domain is naturally graphical, have a lightweight graphical frontend
driving the small simple tools through shellouts or a plugin or library
interface.

In other words, use UNIX.

This isn't difficult to understand, guys.

------
butterfi
I used to adore Adobe, but it all changed over time. It started when I only
needed Photoshop, and yet Adobe insisted I install several other chunks of
software for services I didn't want or need. In the end, I finally found a
solution that lets me get my work done without all the excess Adobe bloatware.
Thank you Pixelmator!

~~~
stdbrouw
I can also recommend Adobe's "Elements" apps. Pixelmator is very nice, but if
you've gotten used to the Adobe way of doing things and don't want to relearn,
Photoshop Elements is sort of like what Photoshop used to be before the
Creative Suite.

------
asherjb
A splash screen seems like a pretty innocuous way of letting you know that the
app is not ignoring you. I imagine that not too many people take such violent
aesthetic offense to them as this guy. Still, they probably allow a longer
load time than users would otherwise find acceptable in their absence.

------
dhm116
At least they aren't following the movie industry's model of forcing you to
watch paid advertisements first...

------
vacri
What a troubled and complex world we live in, when large, complex programs
take 5-10 seconds to load.

I'd much rather my devs work on useful features instead of trying to fool me
into thinking my productivity suite is loaded a few seconds earlier (and also
not dealing with all the bugs that that introduces).

------
toast76
I hate it when people say "I switch my phone on and it starts instantly". No
it doesn't. My iphone takes about a minute to start...of course I never switch
it off, so it's not a problem.

If you never "turn off" Photoshop or Office, they too will appear the instant
you click on them. Amazing!

------
motoford
Don't you think it's odd he is complaining about splash screens when Adobe is
responsible for the worst thing to ever happen to the web -- those stupid
flash intros ? Talk about a waste of time, you had to _wait for the time
waster to load and then wait for it to play_

~~~
talmand
Flash intros are the fault of the people who made them, not the software used
to create them. When HTML5 canvas replaces Flash for such things will you then
blame HTML5?

~~~
jiggy2011
True, although from what I remember the flash development tools seemed to
provide much functionality that seemed to be aimed specifically at creating
things like this.

IIRC there was something that was basically a "flash intro wizard" however
this may well have just been added due to demand from developers for such
features.

~~~
talmand
I don't recall such a wizard in Flash itself, although I wouldn't be
surprised. That kind of thing seems something that a third-party would create
and there are a large number of them out there. The main thing to remember was
that the Flash intro, at one time, was an accepted practice. It was an easy
way for a company to introduce itself, much like a commercial. It wasn't until
it was overused that people started to dislike it and now people only remember
disliking it.

~~~
motoford
I disagree that it was an accepted practice. I don't know of any technical
person who didn't hate them from the very first time they saw one. Remember
this was back during dial-up days and you had to wait forever for that crap to
load. I can't tell you how many sites I left before ever seeing their content
because when I saw flash loading I just switch back to my search engine and
find the next link. Heck, I still do that.

edit: I forgot to mention my even bigger gripe about the flash intros, and
that was because I was basically being forced to sit through a commercial
before I could interact with the company. It went (and goes) against the very
basics of web use.

~~~
talmand
I would say the people defining an accepted practice are the people paying the
bills. If the company wanted it, the technical person made it so they would
get paid. I would admit it was probably the technical people who finally
convinced the majority to abandon them. Plus the fact that over time they
could see that the idea was failing them, much like you point out. But until
that moment it was accepted practice among major websites. The fact you
remember them so vividly in your dislike of them almost proves my point.

But alas, I agree, they were a total waste of time. As I said, the people who
pay the bills don't always listen to the people that they should listen to.

------
mmuro
I agree with him, in principal, that apps should be lighter and faster.
However, Photoshop is just a giant program to do lots of complex things. It's
a burden I'm willing to put up with (for now) because I have yet to make a
transition to a similar, lighter, program.

------
prtamil
For One time if you see splash screen its not a problem. But for example if
visual studio crashes so often and it makes you see to splash so often then as
author mentioned i would feel like i would commit seppuku. They should try
caching or something .

------
veyron
Figure this is the right time to ask about SSDs .. Any recommendations for MBP
SSDs?

~~~
zokier
Intel drives have good reputation.

------
Jasber
About loading screens, I've always wondered why games don't try to get rid of
these (maybe they do?).

Anyone familiar with why you have to have loading screens in games? Would it
be possible to pre-load a level while you're playing?

~~~
bobbyi
They can't follow the article's suggestion of giving you a mini-game to play
during the load screen because that would violate Namco's patent 5,718,632
which covers exactly that:

<http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632>

~~~
jiggy2011
Wow , that's ridiculous. Although I'm not sure what game you could play in the
10 seconds or so it takes to load a program these days, plus you've got to
load the game itself.

I have always wondered though why when doing an OS install they never provided
a game or something interesting to do while you wait rather than show adverts
for the product you are currently installing ("Windows 7 has all these great
new features!".. "I know , hence why I bought it.."). They could at least give
me a browser to use though.

------
lignuist
Another point is file size. Is it really necessary, that every version is
twice as big (just estimating...) as its predecessor?

At least for many websites this trend has been stopped, due to mobile
requirements.

------
jarek-foksa
I remember there was Photoshop clone called Pixel which was doing cold startup
in less than 1 second, so Photoshop slugginess is definitely not caused by
technical limitations.

------
kamjam
I await his next blog post "I got fired for throwing all my toys out the pram"
with great anticipation, where he explains how throwing a massive hissy fit
and not taking his (some good) points up with the team and management.

I don't agree with this faking rubbish though, if it's not usable then I don't
care. There's plenty of bloatware to get rid of in these programs, I doubt the
splash screen is the biggest of worries!

------
techdog
I don't think the guy will lose his job. Do you? He is addressing a very real
issue. Adobe should read this.

~~~
bartj3
Besides whether the issue he's addressing is real or not (i dont agree with
him), this is not the way to address the company you work for and i would
completely agree with Adobe if they do fire him for this.

~~~
talmand
I wouldn't fire him but I would ask that he be a little more informed on how
modern technology works before going on a rant about it. Especially when he
aims his complaints at his own company. There are REASONS for some programs to
load slow, it's not like everyone is competing for the slowest loading
software.

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steele
The WCMS he works on also has significant startup time, even beyond JVM warm-
up. Ah well.

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jakejake
With an SSD drive photoshop loads very fast. It only takes about 2 seconds.

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karolist
I don't think I've even seen a splash screen since SSDs became affordable in
the past 2 years. Also I'm a "give credit where it's due" type of guy and
surnames of people that made the great project I'm launching don't bother me.

This whole blog post reminds me of the "first world problems" meme.

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jwarzech
I stopped reading at "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud"

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mariusmg
Adobe is the definition of bloat.

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dustingetz
if gimp can insta-load, and photoshop gives me a 60 second splash screen,
designers are still going to use photoshop. i would prefer Adobe continues to
invest in the features that matter, not startup times.

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beedogs
hey, I have a solution. Buy a damn SSD if you want to load a 1GB program
faster.

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nixle
SSD, problem solved.

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indiecore
>Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop.

They tried this, everyone got pissed off and asked for a splash screen so they
knew it was loading.

