Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

SPLASH WINDOWS – WHY?

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

No, really, I mean this quite, quite seriously:

  • GIMP
  • OpenOffice / NeoOffice / StarOffice
  • Evolution
  • Freemind
  • etc…

…all of these applications – and several others – when you fire them up the first thing they do is take-over a rectangular box in the middle of your screen so that you cannot get on with your work, nor access the windows behind them.

The box generally gets filled with some manner of logo or other version information, and sits there whilst the application is chundering away, loading.

It may take some time to achieve this.

You can’t access the window it is covering, because the splash window hides it.

You can’t close the window, because there is no close button.

You can’t move it, because there is no drag bar.

You cannot bring other applications in front of the window, because the splash window floats on top.

You shout in vain: YES I KNOW I AM LOADING YOUR FSCKING APPLICATION YOU EGOTISTIC LITTLE GUI-WORSHIPING OPEN-SOURCE PRICKS! THAT’S WHY I PULLED DOWN THE BLOODY MENU TO LAUNCH IT! WHY NOT PISS OFF AND LET ME GET ON WITH MY WORK WHILE YOUR PROGRAM EATS INTO MY CORE MEMORY AND HANGS MY UNDERPOWERED LAPTOP? LISTEN TO MY HARD-DISK CHUGGING AS MY SYSTEM FIGHTS WITH MY COMPILER FOR I/O BANDWIDTH TO PAGE YOU IN! WHY ARE YOU DEPRIVING ME OF THE ABILITY TO EVEN READ MY OWN SCREEN IN THE MEANTIME? DO YOU WANT ME TO SOLELY DEDICATE MY MACHINE TO RUNNING YOUR PROGRAM? DO I REALLY NEED TO BUY A DIFFERENT MACHINE FOR EACH JOB THAT I DO? AM I NOT MEANT TO BE ABLE TO READ ANOTHER WINDOW WHILST LOADING YOUR MARVELOUS PROGRAM? IS YOUR SODDING APPLICATION REALLY SO TERRIFIC THAT YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DENY ME THE MULTITASKING ABILITY OF UNIX? IF I GET A MACHINE WITH TWO HEADS/DISPLAYS/VDUs, WILL YOU PUT A SPLASH WINDOW UP ON ALL OF THEM JUST TO MAKE SURE THAT I KNOW PRECISELY HOW INSECURE YOU ARE ABOUT YOUR ABILITY THAT YOU NEED TO SPLASH ALL OVER EVERYONE’S SCREENS?

Grrrrrrrrrr… two minutes of a grey box, eventually filled by “The GIMP” and a smiley fox-face, the latter lasting 30 seconds.

It drives you bonkers.

Maybe I should start a “Campaign for the Abolition of Application Splash Screens”.

If you’ld like to join-up, leave a comment below.

⊞

Comments

27 responses to “Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens”

  1. bartb
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Sign me up.

    Can the campaign be extended to also work on banning applications that demand focus for no good reason (or that become unusable when a silly notification is not acknowledged… yes, mozilla, I’m looking at you)?

    Reply
  2. Ben
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    You could always go into the Options screens and uncheck the ‘Splash screen’ option, which Mozilla, Firefox, The Gimp and Open Office/StarOffice should all have.

    Grow up, Alec!

    Reply
  3. joni
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    yeah, what you said…

    Also, Dear Web “Developers”, please to stop with the “noresize” option on all those web “application” popups. Not all browsers think like yours does, and anyway, it’s *my* desktop, not yours.

    Reply
  4. alecm
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Growing up has never appealed to me – many people have recommended to me that I try it over the past 37 years, but they tend to be the ones having a miserable time of life – in therapy, chasing the rat race, wound-up about life, stuff like that. I tend to have more fun.

    So, you’re saying that it is more grown-up for me to just shut up and put up with having to manually reconfigure that egotistical subset of my applications which insist on splashing all over the screen?

    Why? Really, why? How does having a splash screen at all, make the application better? Why is it that if splash-screens are so acceptable, the “disable-popups” box is so often checked in people’s browsers?

    Hmmm, Mr Smarty-Pants?

    Reply
  5. alecm
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    ps:

    1) Mozilla and Firefox don’t use splash-screens in my experience.

    2) GIMP: To check I just skimmed the Preferences pane of GIMP 2.0 (MacOS) and found no button to disable such. Some digging around on Slashdot:

    http slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131212&cid=10953125

    …suggests that you have to invoke “gimp -s” to disable the splash screen, so that’s a matter of editing my GNOME menu config at work (and hacking the Launcher on MacOS) in order to bypass someone’s egofest.

    3) I’ll check StarOffice later, and get back to you and your righteous maturity.

    Reply
  6. Chris Samuel
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    I guess splash screens are designed for novice users who don’t understand that their computer might have to go and think for a couple of seconds/minutes/hours before they get any feedback and presume *they* must have done something wrong.

    So they click it again.. then again.. then again.. then wonder why their computer has transmogrified into a writhing thrashing mess and 52 windows are opening, one at a time, very very slowly..

    Chris

    Reply
  7. bartb
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    mmmm… that would still mean that none of those apps should do the splash-screen thing on macos, as there you get the bouncy icon in the dock to show that something’s happening. Much less intrusive, but that seems to have been lost on a number of developers.

    Reply
  8. cryptodendrum
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    More power to you Alec.

    When I was young, I realized that most of the world’s problems were created by grown-ups. I knew then that while I might mature, get old & hopefully grow wiser, – I swore I would never “grow-up” and become part of the ever increasing problem. Now I am also 37, and that philosphy has served me well – much better than many of my high-school and University peers who proceeded to “grow up”.

    A ban on splash screens and unfriendly dialog boxes is an absolute must have. If my TV, blender, oven or toilet had splash screens every time I’d use them, I’d probably be forced to give it all up and become firken Amish.

    cryptodendrum

    Reply
  9. Ben
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Oh, it’s soooo hard to add a command-line switch to your start-up menu.

    If you’re so bothered by the splash screen in the Gimp, contribute the ‘disable splashscreen’ code to the project… or stop using it. Afterall, the folks who wrote the Gimp don’t deserve any credit for saving you cost of a PaintShopPro or PhotoShop license do they?

    I’d have to agree with Chris Samuel, splash screens are for novice users, and for tools like Eclipse that load so much functionality at start-up, it’s worthwhile having a splash screen for the progress bar!

    Ben

    Reply
  10. John Cowan
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    OO.o’s splash screen isn’t forced to the front, at least not on Windows, so it’s not that annoying. I fire up a document, switch to some other window, and go right on working.

    Reply
  11. Firas
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    I’m on MS Windows, and splash screens go to the background upon clicking another window. It sounds like your problem is more specific to behavioural issues in the window manager than with splash screens per se. Death to ‘always on top’ type application windows 🙂

    I like the GIMP splash screen, it shows that the team behind it can put together some neat graphics. What I exceptionally dislike are the kinda splash screens I’ve seen for Adobe Acrobat.. full of copyright and patent notices. Like, what the hell?

    Reply
  12. glasser
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    This is especially lame on Macs, since Apple has a perfectly fine global splash-screen substitute (the bouncing Dock icon).

    Reply
  13. John Clingan
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    I’m not against splash screens as feedback is welcome when it’s welcome. I’m against modal splashscreens for the reasons you state.

    The very idea of modal splash screens on a multi-tasking desktop is counter-intuitive and as you state, counter productive.

    Reply
  14. Delano Mandelbaum
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Boooooo to splash screens

    Reply
  15. Ilja
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    IIRC mozilla and firefox do have a splash screen, but it is off by default. mozilla -splash will give you the mozilla splash screen.

    Reply
  16. alecm
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re still *wrong*.

    Very very wrong. Get over it.

    Given how flaky GNOME is, then I do find the matter of which command to be using rather intimidating, and I wouldn’t be the only one. Worse with the MacOS launcher I wouldn’t know where to start – a script somewhere in the bowels of Gimp.app perhaps. I could do it, but that makes two platforms upon which I would have to do it, separately.

    Per application.

    if it is possible at all.

    As for “removing credit” – that’s a particularly weak strawman argument that you’re presenting there. You will have to do better. There is – after all – a perfectly acceptable “About…” menu item in most applications in which I am totally happy for implementors to have a fireworks show if they so wish.

    They should not, however, waste CPU time and my screen real-estate by reminding me of how more fluffy their rendered logo cartoon character is, than the commercial equivalent.

    Incidentally: You were the person who was saying that I should just trivially “click the disable-splashscreen checkbox”; now you’re telling me to just trivially write some code and make a patch.

    You’re not really helping your “usability” credentials, here…

    Reply
  17. alecm
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    off-by-default?

    i’d be perfectly happy with that.

    my goal would be to make this waste of time socially unacceptable, and see if we can change some of the bigger ones.

    Reply
  18. Chris Samuel
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Hmm, I use KDE and I don’t get problems with splash screens. Sounds like Gnome hasn’t changed much since I gave up on it in the late 90’s because it spent most of its time crashing.. 🙁

    Sure, OOo and Gimp put them up, but they don’t grab focus and they don’t stop me going to another another desktop and working there whilst they start up.

    The Mac is more limited I find because in the default config there’s no other desktop to switch to, and it’s slower than my PC in general (asides from booting up).

    I’ve not noticed NeoOffice/J grabbing focus there though.

    Chris

    Reply
  19. Fraxas
    No No No No NO

    I agree that splash screens are annoying when you know what’s going on, and are working on a VERY fast computer.

    But I want *IMMEDIATE* feedback that the icon I clicked actually did something. That’s why the splash screen is there for Office — it didn’t use to be there, but people got impatient after about half a second of the computer “not doing anything” and clicked the icon again And again. and again and again. Eventually, they got 7 copies of Word open, and would confuse themselves endlessly when they started typing in one, and then came back and got distracted by another.

    I agree that splash screens shouldn’t force themselves to the top, nor appear when they don’t need to — that’s developer hubris and it’s spiteful. But I think that abolishing splash screens altogether because they annoy power-user nerds with intimate understandings of their computers would be a HUGE step back for usability in general.

    Sheesh.

    Reply
  20. alecm
    re: No No No No NO

    > But I want *IMMEDIATE* feedback that the icon I clicked actually did something

    Fine. Fix your window manager to monitor the process being launched and have it jiggle the icon on the desktop, or whatever. Don’t hack the applications to provide that functionality. Aside from any other reason, consider (in a Unix environment) that if your $DISPLAY or Xauthority is messed up, you might launch several dozen instances of the Application, all chundering in the background and eating resources, none quite managing to connect() to your display device.

    That *really* sucks to fix. “kill -9 -1” time.

    So log a bug with Microsoft, GNOME, or whoever, if you want this functionality.

    I presume from your story that you’ld be annoyed like me, on slower machines, that the “instant” display of a splash screen actually takes seven-or-so seconds of doing nothing, which merely foreshadows the longer period it takes to get the application properly spun-up.

    So much for the “it provides instant feedback of application launch” argument.

    Reply
  21. alecm
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Hi John,

    >I […] switch to some other window, and go right on working.

    You *like* doing that?

    Reply
  22. Stephen Usher
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Blurgh! NeoOffice/J

    Slugs on valium are faster. It was unusable on the machine I tried it on, admittedly an iMac Summer 2000 edition with 384MB of memory.

    IMHO splash screens are only there for three reasons: ego boost, product/company advertising and prolonged boot notification/debugging.

    Anyone using the first two should be hung, drawn, quartered, trampled by a herd of rampaging elephants and buried in peat.

    As for the third, well, I’d see it as an admission that the application is slow, bloated and not well designed in the first instance. It would be better to bring up the application main window and have a status bar on that giving information about the status of loading plug-ins etc. in the background while allowing the user to access the basic file access menus. But that would mean actually throwing some thought into the application design rather than jerry-rigging bolt-ons onto old code which wasn’t designed to work in a fully multi-tasking environment. (Am I looking at Photoshop or any Adobe application.. maybe? Or could I say StarOffice/OpenOffice.org?)

    Reply
  23. 68.164.12.37
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Sorry mate, but here is how ya do it in windows.

    gimp-2.2.exe -s (check out the gimp man page; look for silent)

    OpenOffice; look for the soffice file and change Logo=1 to Logo=0

    PS: I despise logo too.

    Reply
  24. mark
    re: Pet Peeve: Application Splash Windows/Screens

    Nice rant there buddy. I was thinking just the same thing. I was getting annoyed that when Gnome restores my session and Gimp is started up my screen is unusable until the splash goes away. Horrible UI design idea. I did a search on google and found a tip from a user here to use gimp -s option to disable this abomination. Thank you for addressing this matter.

    Reply
  25. FuzzyDogSlayer

    Couldn’t have said it better myself.

    Reply
  26. suraj

    Sign me up too. Splash screens suck. Atleast there should be an option to disable it.

    Reply
  27. Bartek

    I agree with Alec. I just dont wanna to grow up too early. Anyway, I’m just 29 😉

    Reply

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