30 December 2011

Lies, Damned Lies and Progress Indicators

Here are some you may have met. (Click start, in a modern non-Microsoft* browser, on each one.)

The perfect progress indicator (rarely seen in the wild).

START DONE predicted actual

The software installer progress bar

START DONE predicted actual

The software uninstaller progress bar

START DONE predicted actual

The media-download progress bar.

START DONE predicted actual

The software update progress bar.

START DONE predicted actual

No wonder so many cop out and use one of these:

http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/abouttag/njr/image/red-spinner.gif

* [Why non-Microsoft? Before going all HTML5 and SVG on this blog I made a point of testing things with Internet Explorer 9 and was delighted to find that everything seemed to work fine there. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to test SMIL-based SVG animation, which works (you guessed it) on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, iPhone, iPad and even newer Androids, but not, in fact, Internet Explorer 9.]

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