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Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

A splash screen basically tells me, in very clear-cut terms, that my time is worth nothing whatsoever. It's a fresh reminder that users' needs don't count as much as programmer convenience does.

So... how much IS your time worth? How much extra would you be willing to pay for instantly-responsive applications? Programmer time isn't free, either.

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One other thing to keep in mind: if you dislike splash screens but don't have an SSD, then you have already placed a maximum dollar value on how much you care about your applications' loading time.

Exactly right. The splash screen is there only to show what it's doing while loading all the libraries and parsing setting files. If this guy/girl really hated the photoshop startup screen, he should do two things:

1. Get a better harddrive setup for his business.

2. Have photoshop start automatically after boot.

A quick timed test on two striped SSD's: Photoshop starts up in 4 seconds from click to ready. Blender takes about 1.5 second.

Nope, programmer time is indeed not free. But so many of the people reading HN are trying to "go wide" and appeal to very large audiences. Quite often they are services offered in some sort of freemium model where you hope that the user comes to love and depend on your service. That depends on a positive experience.

You're thinking like your existing users will have to "pay more" to get a faster experience, when in reality you are losing money because of the would-be users who give up and go away. A few days spent reducing load times and ironing out delays can make an application feel fast and increase conversion rates. Plus it makes everyone feel good about using the product. Delay==Frustration.

Now if you're lucky, perhaps your startup is in a situation like Adobe where they pretty much have a lock on high-end graphics editing and can say, "You will wait for our splash screen because you have no other choice and we're kinda busy making money here so just wait." That kind of thinking will get your users mad, but since you were lucky. But they'll remember, and have no qualms about bailing out the first chance they get.

Why should users have to pay extra??

The new version of Basecamp (by the guys who invented Rails) focused on speed, because speed = $$$.

The question is, why would you throw away your userbase because your app is so slow to load, it's cutting into their productivity?

There is a very large gap between 'instantly responsive applications' and Photoshop.

Right, because all software is equal in complexity therefore they should all share the same requirement in resource loading and time?

If you're on Windows and you want an editor that loads fast, you can just type mspaint.exe. Oh, it doesn't do everything you need? Yeah, guess what, those extra features take time to load.

Someone has to pay. Whether it's a higher price for users, less time spent on other features, or lower profits for the company, the effort has to come from somewhere.

I don't disagree that responsiveness and user experience are important, but Basecamp is a webapp. Responsiveness for the most common tasks is a higher priority than the one-time cost at start-up.

I'm not sure anyone is "throwing away their userbase"... How many people stop using Photoshop because it takes too long to start? Now, Acrobat Reader on the other hand...

Every Photoshop equivalent program I've ever used (with the same level of functionality) takes at least the same amount of time to load. I'm pretty sure GIMP actually takes longer.

I don't understand why everyone thinks the fact Basecamp is a webapp is important.

As you say, responsiveness and user experience are important, and 37 Signals decided it was worth investing a significant amount in. Adobe have decided, over the years, that it is not.

Because comparing app loading time to website page load times is meaningless.

A better comparison are common tasks in Photoshop, like selection, fill, layer operations, filters, etc. - things that are done constantly while using the application. I don't have any point of reference, but they feel pretty responsive to me. If the article was making a case that Adobe has been neglecting optimization for common operations, then bringing up Basecamp or other webapps would be relevant.

I'm not sure how to explain it more clearly than that.

Is waiting 5-10 seconds honestly "cutting into their productivity"? Even so, there's nothing else that could be done with their time while they wait beyond impotently staring and swearing at their computer?

If that's how they operate then quite frankly they deserve to have "lost" that time.

The program that I use which takes the longest to load is eclipse , that takes around 10 seconds to load.

All I do when I switch my computer on in the morning is load up my mail client which opens pretty much instantly and then click the eclipse icon. By the time I've glanced at my mail to see if there's anything urgent that needs my immediate attention eclipse has already loaded.

I would say I lose exponentially more time to interruptions and distractions than I do waiting for my computer to load anything.

The only time my computer takes a really long time to do anything is when I have to copy down a large dataset from production to my workstation to debug some weird issue. This is going to take 10 minutes anyway so I just use the time to make coffee or something.

Basecamp is a bit different, since the application itself is running mostly server-side so it is essentially already loaded. It's possible that the startup/init time of the actual RoR application on a server may take considerably longer.

With web applications the key to speed is more about writing efficient JS, having a good caching strategy and ensuring your server can handle many concurrent requests. A lot of these can be solved by the developers simply throwing more money at their server tech, when it comes to client-only applications you can't realistically buy all of your users new computers.

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