Crate
My job is really varied. Some days I spend nine hours hunting down bugs in complex computer code. Some days I draw crates.
(This one contains the same objects as the briefcase in Pulp fiction)
My Itunes vs Apples
Today Itunes 9 was released. Of course the new “big” features wasn’t what caught my eye, but rather that nice looking Bob Dylan page. Too bad my Itunes 9 is not as pretty as Apples (US?) apparently are:
The Bob Dylan page as Apple shows it
The Bob Dylan page in my european Itunes
Fake loaders
A while back I was linked to a site called Ajaxload.info. Quite a nice site, very creative. With a few simple steps it lets you create your own customized ajax loader animated gif, just as the ones you’ve seen in numerous sites and applications.
This is definitely a service I have use for, but it also got me thinking. Is this really such a good idea? Why are we so obsessed by a progress bar that perhaps even is counter-intuitive?
In Windows, this is how a typical progress bar looks like:
Now, we all know that Windows is terribly bad at guessing how long time a certain action will take. The above progress bar might go to 90% in 5 seconds, and then spend 2 minutes more doing the last 10%.
Mac OS X got a similar one (with a fancy little candy stripe animation that gives the illusion of the progress moving faster than it is):
It’s not as inaccurate as Windows, but pretty close.
It doesn’t matter. What they both are doing is filling an important role as to tell you that the computer is working, it has not hung, and it’s has a goal of completing the action. The standard ajax loader on the other hand, is just a gif animation. It does not continuously get fed information about the progress. It will spin and rotate forever and ever until someone decides to hide it, and it might happen, it might not.
In the beginning of this post I said that the ajax loaders might even be counter-intuitive. What I mean by that is that you are tricked into believing that this animation has any idea of what’s going on backend wise, when it has not. You could actually improve the process by exchanging the loader to a dancing banana instead. It would be exactly the same function, but hey, it’s a dancing banana! You wouldn’t wait five extra minutes because the banana is still dancing before you realize that the task will never complete.
Here’s a typical ajax loader gif animation:
Are you waiting for something?