86
What software do you wish that existed?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
86 points (92.2% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26980 readers
496 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Accurate progress bars and “remaining time” displays (yes, I know that this isn’t technically possible, but we’re wishing here).
I don’t want to see my computer/phone grind away for a few minutes yet still be at “0%”, then jump to “76%”, chug away some more, then abruptly finish a task. When something is going to take time, I wanna know if we’re talking “stare at the screen for a minute” kind of time or “find something else to do for a while” kind of time.
I just want to do a humble brag here and say that there are some programmers that care.
30 years ago when I used to make multimedia training software, I would run an installer with another script running that would time stamp completion of the different install steps.
I would average them out and using the equivalent of a player piano, "playback" the progress bar on the end-user install.
So instead of reporting that a certain percentage was done which didn't actually represent the time, you got an extremely accurate progress bar that on almost every computer, went up at a very predictable rate.
It's a grotesquely easy thing to do and I don't know why it hasn't become common practice.
Like you said, as developers, there’s often nothing we can do about this. The state prior to something taking forever can be exactly the same as the state prior to it finishing quickly, so there’s no way for us to predict it.
The best we can do is give you a throbber.
That’s better than nothing! At least I know my computer isn’t frozen.