I remember as a kid I used to really dislike loading bars in games that didn’t indicate progress. A lot of early PS1 and PS2 games would have real progress indicators when loading the game or loading a new level. What’s more is the actual mechanics behind what was being represented became more apparent to me as I got into modding. On GTA San Andreas, after many hours of crashes when testing my own mods and other people’s, I could confidently tell you what kinds of files are being read at various levels of progress of the loading bar. Nowadays you’re lucky to get a spinning logo for a few seconds, most of the waiting is on the network as assets stream from NVME storage almost instantly.
The spinning bar is not indicating progress. It indicate the app is waiting on something. It also tell you the app has not crashed or hanged.
There is nothing wrong with it per say. App often have to wait and they don’t know how long. The problem is that a lot of web app are crap, and don’t add a timeout and a retry to the wait. But even then, the timeout/retry is usually done by the user: After a while they reload the page or just give up.
It’s not a great experience, but it work, and as long as it work, money keep flowing, and whatever doesn’t hinder the flow of money is not getting fixed.
I’ve heard that the progress bar when booting macOS is actually backed by a timer which runs for as long as it took macOS to boot last time.
I detest it when technology lies to me.
I remember as a kid I used to really dislike loading bars in games that didn’t indicate progress. A lot of early PS1 and PS2 games would have real progress indicators when loading the game or loading a new level. What’s more is the actual mechanics behind what was being represented became more apparent to me as I got into modding. On GTA San Andreas, after many hours of crashes when testing my own mods and other people’s, I could confidently tell you what kinds of files are being read at various levels of progress of the loading bar. Nowadays you’re lucky to get a spinning logo for a few seconds, most of the waiting is on the network as assets stream from NVME storage almost instantly.
At the very least, put a “This seems to be taking a long time. You may need to try again.” message somewhere…
The spinning bar is not indicating progress. It indicate the app is waiting on something. It also tell you the app has not crashed or hanged.
There is nothing wrong with it per say. App often have to wait and they don’t know how long. The problem is that a lot of web app are crap, and don’t add a timeout and a retry to the wait. But even then, the timeout/retry is usually done by the user: After a while they reload the page or just give up.
It’s not a great experience, but it work, and as long as it work, money keep flowing, and whatever doesn’t hinder the flow of money is not getting fixed.
The problem is that in this case, the app has crashed/hung. That’s what’s wrong with it.