Next blog post in progress…
Every day I see many of those supposed progress indicators. But they don’t indicate anything other than lazy and sloppy programming. That little icon will go on spinning regardless of what is actually happening. In the rare situations where it really does relate to work being done, it rarely relates in a useful way. It seems that these days most software is written with several assumptions in mind:
Everything occurs instantaneously and reliably
Users are incapable of dealing with actual information or numbers
Fancy graphics are more important than solid well-written code
The first assumption is laughable, the second is insulting, and the third is sad.
It shouldn’t be hard to do this right. Many years ago I cooked up a simpleminded progress indicator which tells you what is happening, and about how long it might take. It was quick and stupidly simple to write.
Loading host info for urolite.example.com… 16 of 17 (94.1%) 9s ETA 1s
But as for the progress on this blog, I have nearly a dozen mostly finished drafts waiting to be posted, but I’ll leave that icon spinning so that you know that something is going on.