Wednesday Rant: More on Time -or- Moron Time
There is a dirty little secret in the computer business that no one ever talks about, but everybody knows about (so how can it be a secret then, you might ask?)
It is this: Computer people, meaning programmers and computer sales forces, lie about how long computers take to do things all the time.
You've seen the ad for some bank, where the voice-over says "Sharon is about to demonstrate how to check for an on-line balance report from Citi-Bank." Then Sharon pushes one button on her computer and her bank balance appears instantly.
Horse pucky.
Yes, you can accomplish this exactly this way, after you have navigated to their site, logged on, navigated to your account, navigated to the "display current balance" control, (at each step, waiting for their server, your isp's server, and your own sluggard computer to perform the requested tasks), paused briefly to turn on the camera, and then pushed the "one button" that finishes the task.
Similarly, many user programs often make use of a "progress bar," a sort of horizontal display space on the page in which a colored line grows from left to right to indicate how the program and your computer are progressing with some task. This is most often used with installation software, but many other tasks that can take a long time to accomplish use the technique so that you know the process is still under way, i.e. that your computer hasn't just hung up and frozen in place.
Problem is, the progress across the screen generally bears little or no relationship with the actual progress of the process underway. Much more often than not, the progress bar will fill in very quickly, zooming from empty to maybe 80% or 90% filled in, in just a few seconds, then stopping there, showing no further life (or maybe just a flashing segment in the progress bar, or a perpetually redrawn elipsis after the words "please wait"), sometimes literally for HOURS!
Some programs accompany this display with an actual numerical read-out, indicating that the process has zoomed to, say 89% complete, then just stopped there for minutes or days.
Is it really beyond the skills of these software companies to provide at least a moderately accurate progress bar ... one that represents time expended vs. time left, rather than whatever it is that they're assessing now? (Like what? Maybe files executed vs. files remaining? You know, four hundred out of four-hundred and one files have been executed, so we're 99.75% complete, never mind that the first four hundred were two-lines of code each, and that the last one is the actual execution of the install program?)
It would help if they would try their progress bar out on a computer representative of the ones actual users are actually using, too, instead of the quad-processor machines with terabyte drives that they use for their work.
I know that these programs are run on a wide variety of computers with widely varying hardware setups and drive space available, and so-on, but is the current state of affairs really the best they can do?
Also, it would be nice if there were just a little icon, like, oh, I don't know, maybe an hour glass symbol or something, that would indicate that something is underway while the program is running but with no user-visible output. Oh wait, there already is such an icon! Then why don't they use it? Microsoft is the worst about this.
Oh, I feel so much better now.
posted by Mique @ 3:04 PM
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