Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Mr Dave — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 07:58:00 GMT

Time and % are useless especiallyl the longer the process.

Some sign of life - e.g file names flashing by or some other life sign is very useful.

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Joku — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 09:03:00 GMT

I understand there's lot of registration of components etc weird things going during installation, but what i never understand is why the installer programs do the file copying without thinking ahead?

The installer program should go and think about the process like a power user, so the user don't have to be a power user.

When i as a power user think about installing some load-intense huge app, i think like this:
First (mistake) suppose the app vendor has established a load/startup pattern of the applications files and OS related files.

Now as a power user i want that the application load is fast, so i want the space that's going to get allocated to the app installed to be contiguous and close to the OS DLL's to avoid full seeks. This is difficult to accomplish, usually taking hours to arrange by hand if the disk/partition for applications is getting full.

Now suppose everything went like a plan, i should have the newly app installing itself close to the .NET assemblies and OS DLL's and whatever, or to a another HDD's program dedicated partition. Now that the space is contiguous, the file copying process will be around 50 MB/s (naturally if the app/game is in CD i will make it image on separate HDD to be mounted as a virtual drive). When the app is installed it will be able to do the startup loading with a very few small seeks as it's properly arranged on the disk and files are installed in sequential manner that the app vendor figured out before making the installation program.

This could be taken a bit further still, but with fast CPU there's no need to go that far.

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Julien Ellie — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 09:03:00 GMT

Yes I don't think people care so much as long as they see "it's moving" and at a reasonable pace. I think some sort of UI indicating "Speed" rather than "length" or "ETA" would be the a better UI widget for, well pretty much any sort of computing you can't say for sure how much is remaining.

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Joku — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 09:06:00 GMT

So if you missed my point above, app vendor should 1) figure the loading pattern/seeks 2) have the install program defrag a contiguous space near to the OS libraries, while not messing up with other apps installed in similar manner 3) instead of spending time copying files all around the hdd in fragmented manner, copy the files straight to the newly defragmented contiguous space.

It's all possible, and would have helped a lot, now that you can get 10000 rpm WD Raptor with 200$, this won't be such a big deal, but it will still cut the seeking noises a lot!

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Joku — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 09:30:00 GMT

I apologize for triple posting, but while i'm at it: Instead of having the installers handle the smart contiguous positionin of files on the disk, it would be smarter to have the filesystem handle this. There could be some interface with this 'smart filepositioning filesystem' that would allow application installers to also specify the order of the files Or the filesystem could be a self-arranging one, it would look the commonly occuring seek patterns, and re-arrange the files all over the drive in a very slow, lazy manner on the background, so that it could be re-arranging files all the time and avoiding full seeks by only arranging the part of disk that the head is currently nearby..

Damn now i feel smart, i bet someone has already implemented all this!?:(

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

David Cumps — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 10:55:00 GMT

I agree with Mr Dave, filenames passing by is nice, it tells me the installer didn't crash ;)

As for progressbars, I don't look at them or think about them most of the time, because I often see progress bars reset themselves? Like when they're halfway they suddenly drop back a third and go on. I don't trust progressbars in installers.

The VS.NET installer is good, you see action, all those little tiny files coming by. But the windows installer on the other hand is annoying. You get 5 blocks as an animated gif moving around, and a time estimate, and slides that go in a loop over and over

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Ferris Beuller — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 11:26:00 GMT

3428575434584 minuites remaining is common when copying CD or DVD size files (movies etc or ISO images) with file explorer so no, theyre are a waste of time.

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Devil Dude — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 15:59:00 GMT

i dont get why there isnt a widget that acts like the "progress bar" in the win xp loading screen, it doesnt make predictions and it doesnt look that bad

just a thought

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Philip Rieck — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 17:23:00 GMT

Don't forget the incredibly useful progress bar with multiple starts -- like MSI processes:

It goes from 0 to 100%. Then it goes from 0 to 100%. How many times is it going to do it? You don't know. Great, it's 98% done with process 3 of [x]. So I know that it will be done sometime. Maybe.

I like the "I'm doing something bar",like windows xp startup... just an infinite progress bar that says "I'm alive! Please wait."

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

ron — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 17:59:00 GMT

For Visual Studio, we really don't care about the progress bar. We install it on one machine and know how much time it takes then we install it on the other machines.

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

denny — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 20:20:00 GMT

show
Total Files: 1234
FIles Copied : 1234
Remaining: 0

and so do the same for Reg. items and related tasks.

perhaps for the "big installs" like VS have these details shown as an option during setup.

along with the old 76% bar

re: Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

Thales — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 22:26:00 GMT

Talking about progress bars: http://broken.typepad.com/b/2004/03/encarta_status_.html

;)