Daring Fireball: The Daily Wait
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
"10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect."
Read on crystal clear explanation of why this is and how to build around if load time is a must:
Maybe this is why Jakob Nielsen is so hated: he allows himself to be banal, he allows his web-design to be banal, he allows his conclusions and suggestions to be banal.
There is no easy way to say this - the first revision of "The Daily" is an embarrassment. When I pick up the WSJ - it's about 10 seconds after I launch that I start reading that days paper. The Daily not only takes so long to start, that I've _already_ lost interest in trying to read it, the total download time is so excessive that I never bother to let the entire thing download. WSJ is quick, snappy.
I realize a lot of this is because of the massive video / photo content - but they need to do something about this App quickly or their going to lose 80% of their potential audience before they even _try_ reading the darn thing.
Anyone else left wondering what the other two issues were?
[edit] Well, this is embarrassing...
It takes me longer than a minute twenty to walk to the curb and back to pick up the wall street journal. Perhaps Gruber has figured out the reason that no one has ever read newspapers?
No wait, full articles, with video. Plus it works in any web browser, not just the iPad.
I'm really hoping this is part of iOS 5.
Other news apps have solved the problem. Safari can retrieve the entire internet without background fetching. Surely the Daily's problem is easier than Safari's.
He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. Most reviewers commented on the sluggish cover flow without realizing it's still downloading for quite some time once you get the first pages.
Watch the spinner in upper left. Most of the issue downloads AFTER you can interact.
PS - I decided to open up The Daily to confirm that the JPEG artifacts do not go away after further loading. They do not. However, it is a little after midnight for me now, so when I opened the app, I hit the "A new issue of The Daily is being delivered" wait screen. How poetic.
You're reading this wrong. What you're describing isn't what he was talking about. He's talking about letting it download in the background, as in, iPad is sleeping, and it automatically downloads over night, without having the app open.
He does mention background downloading how you describe it. He does, however, mention that waiting a minute twenty to even get to that stage is annoying. Basically, he says that it should open up within 10 seconds, and download in the background as needed. Not a minute twenty.
> I’m saying they need to engineer the app so that it can start showing something interesting in 10 seconds or less — and then keep downloading the rest of the issue, piece by piece, in the background.
And that's exactly what it does. It keeps downloading the rest (most of it in fact), piece by piece, in the background. Just takes too long to first interaction.
No, that's not exactly what it does. It starts showing something in 80 seconds, and still downloads. He doesn't say it doesn't download things in the background. He excplicitly says it does that. What he's saying is the implementation is poor. You misread it.
Where does he explicitly say it downloads things in the background, or even vaguely imply it?
At no point does he acknowledge it downloads anything after the initial spinner. "Watching a splash screen rotate a “Loading…” spinner for 80 seconds isn’t it."
Full quote: "I’m not saying The Daily needs to magically make an entire new issue download to an iPad in 10 seconds or less. I’m saying they need to engineer the app so that it can start showing something interesting in 10 seconds or less — and then keep downloading the rest of the issue, piece by piece, in the background."
He's specifically not -- and neither was I -- talking about downloading in the background when the app isn't running: "I realize", he says, "that iOS has no mechanism that would allow The Daily to have issues download automatically in the background, overnight."
Instead, his last two paragraphs are asking for them to "engineer" a mechanism to show something quickly and download more after. He points out other apps that have such a mechanism, and accomplish it in varying amounts of time. This app also has such a mechanism, but no phrase acknowledges that. If he knew it was doing that, he could have said, "Like Flipboard and others, The Daily is downloading most of the issue in the background, but since they already have that mechanism built in, they need to get the new issue's cover shown in 10 seconds instead of 80."
Instead, he says, "they need to engineer the app so that it can start showing something interesting ... then keep downloading the rest of the issue piece by piece", as though it weren't already "engineered" to do such a thing, just choosing to get too much.
As an aside, something's up with his broadband. I'm in NYC. Not sure what's wrong with his connection, but here's how long it takes on my iPad which is slow on WiFi with the 4.3 beta 2 dev build:
0 - 10 seconds: splash screen (app itself is loading)
10 - 22 seconds: black (what's that about?)
22 - 44 seconds: Loading... spinner (initial pages loading)
44 seconds: cover image and adjacent pages viewable, interactivity enabled
Note that this is roughly half the time he's experiencing.
45 seconds to completion: spinner changes to 0% - 100% progress pie chart, issue can be browsed while this is downloading the rest of the issue.
He may in fact mean what you're saying, but that's not what he wrote. He wrote a lot of copy about engineering a mechanism to show something and download more later, without once acknowledging it has such a mechanism already.
Final proof I'm not misreading:
"I noticed yesterday that it took way too long to load the day’s new issue. From the time I tapped the icon on my home screen until I could read a single page, today’s issue took one minute and twenty seconds."
No. At the time you can read a single page, it has not downloaded "the day's issue". It has downloaded enough for interactivity to begin. It downloads most of "today's issue" after he stopped the timer.
Sorry, I was mistaken about that.
Still, everything else I said still stands. It's not downloading in 10 seconds and letting you use it. It's downloading in 80 seconds and letting you use it. Both cases allow for continued downloading. You asserted that currently the app downloads and is usable in 10 seconds. It is not. That's my contention, based on DF, and that is where the confusion lied in your comment.
More precisely, it's not the downloading in the background that's important, rather, the interactivity within 10 seconds that is.
On the contrary, my first comment was:
"He's right it's slow to let you interact. He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background."
Furthermore, I provided my own timings, none of which "asserted" it's usable in 10 seconds.
Again, I agree with Gruber it's slow. I disagree with you that I read him wrong. He did fail to acknowledge the app is engineered to download most of the issue in the background after (too slowly, whether 45 seconds or 80) allowing interactivity to begin.
Discussing this any further risks becoming circular.
I can't see how a few jpegs and some markup takes 120 seconds to download.
Or perhaps they are putting everything in a much chunkier format?
I don't know. You're asking the wrong person. =)
Between the 1 minute wait and the requirement that you launch it daily it misses all the good stuff about the old dead-tree version.
Not that an alternative browser would matter in this case, because The Daily is an app, not a website.
We desperately need better HTML5 authoring tools, something like InDesign. It would be so nice if The Daily were using Webkit.
Well, you wouldn't want to risk customers stealing an article. Or a verb.
Gawd, you can almost hear Murdoch's bones turning to stone.
edit: If Apple is giving them early access to the subscription API and Apple is using The Daily to show off the power of the subscription API and tout the Apple ecosystem... it just screams of something that Apple would be intimately involved in. If they weren't, it's equally silly. I'm not saying its fair, but Apple has certainly jeopardized the perception of this portion of their platform due to The Daily's shortcomings.
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/03/020411-news-boxes-br...
(This is so stupid. I certainly don’t want to buy The Daily but it’s not the only offender in this regard. I would assume that making The Daily available in every App Store in existence is a matter of clicking a checkbox or something like that. What’s stopping them? Are there legal issues?)
The Daily is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp. I'm not going to post links to various sources here that state that fact. Google is an excellent resource for finding out such things - I regularly consult it before attempting to shoot down people's comments (just in case my argument is unfounded). I also respect HN's rules about posting links all over the place.
Although John Gruber has been critical of Apple in the past, he is thought of by many (especially of late) to be Apple's unpaid mascot; solidly supporting their opinions on the Flash situation and the WebM/H.264 debate. To be honest, my comment was more to do with my feelings on his recent behaviour, because I connected more with the John Gruber that brought us Markdown and other great things, rather then John Gruber the Apple fanboy. I just wish we got to see more of that side of him, but it seems to be fading.
I don't appreciate your congratulations. I never entered the ugh pageant, and nobody likes to win the 'doubly wrong' prize, especially when they're not.
I think that next time I'll provide a bit more information, lest someone think that I'm here to spout sensationalist drivel.
And Gruber still is critical of Apple. That’s not a thing of the past. Just because he doesn’t agree with some of your personal opinions about something doesn’t make him an fanboy (which is a stupid word anyway and should never be used to describe anyone. It’s a lame dismissal of serious debate, a conversation stopper.)
The reason Apple did the subscription stuff was because only they could. They simply do not allow anything on the app store to have in-app payments unless they pass through the app store itself and they get their tasty 30% cut.
As an aside: I dislike the word fanboy too. I do however like extremist, zealot, fanatic and dogmatist. They just roll off the tongue - fanboy is just too modern in comparison.
“extremist, zealot, fanatic and dogmatist”
Justify yourself or shut up.
As for the "extremist...." remark, I wasn't insinuating that Gruber was any of these things. I was trying to appeal to the sensibility of someone who thinks "Hey, you are doubly wrong, congratulations!" is somehow a more constructive response than my initial comment. I've clearly failed in this regard.
The only sane way to do this is obviously to run it in the background overnight, a thing any program can do on android.
This argument is a false dichotomy, suggesting that the only two options are download things overnight or wait a huge amount of time to show something. Other apps show something in the first ten seconds, so clearly there are more than two options possible here, and given that iOS doesn't allow overnight downloading, the criticism here is that the developers failed to choose the best option of those available.
Arguing that Apple should allow overnight downloading is interesting, but not related to what these developers should do.