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Despite leaps and bounds in the advancements in technology—we now have shiny little rectangles that respond to touch and voice and connect us to other people half way round the world!—one thing still sucks hard: stalled progress bars.
It’s not just waiting for things to happen which is annoying—it’s that they’re inaccurate. There is little more annoying than a progress bar, sat at 57 percent, taunting you. Never shifting. It hasn’t really managed 57 percent of the task. Of course it hasn’t.
And then you realise it might never finish the task. It laughs in your face. “Oh no no, don’t expect this software install to finish for another 5 minutes despite the fact that I say 99 percent done,” it sneers. “I’m not really here to inform you. I’m more… decoration.”
Seriously, is there anything else like this left in tech that feels like it hasn’t moved on in the last twenty years?
Image by RIchard Adams under Creative Commons license
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxyhfiCO_XQ . Sloppy journalism.
Did you know it’s possible to say something is a problem, whilst maintaining the perspective that there are worse problems in the world?
Why bother contributing if all you’re going to say is ‘First world problems’?
We all know it’s not a major problem considering many things around the world and don’t need some sanctimonious poster trying to make other posters feel bad for commenting.
You’ve obviously got a computer and no doubt other gadgets etc that if you hadn’t bought but instead sent the money to Africa it could have paid for clean fresh water for a village or helped to educate 20 kids in Asia or a million other things to help solve ‘Third world problems’.
I think its more that although this is supposeded to be news site and this isn’t news, its a boring blog post about something that annoys you, it doesn’t inform or educate, you could have looked into how progress bars work and why they stall and how they make approximations, but instead you just whined.
I hate these “first world problem” comment’s. It does my ******* head in.
Yes we’re extremely lucky and grateful with what we have, others are not so fortunate.
This holier than thou bullshit attitude needs to stop.
I was responding directly to the title – Is there anything more annoying than a stalled progress bar? There certainly is.
I then went on to comment that I thought this was sloppy journalism (albeit without saying) because it simply points it out. Theres no decent discussion (as pointed out above) about why progress bars stalled, no new developments with this and then you realise its literally just a vague thought that has popped into this guys head, so he just thought fuck it and wrote the article.
I’m slightly shocked by the general response to that comment. You don’t have to sell your fucking computer mate to support undeveloped countries.
The ones on OS X look like they are always moving due to the ripple
http://lockerz.com/u/20717855/decalz/8847558/progress_bar_illusions
My computer science professor called it the “bar of lack of progress”. Pretty accurate description I must say.
I think the bars which aren’t linked to the 0-100% progress and just repeatedly fill up, empty, fill up, empty and are basically useless. Like spinning progress wheels that are so hip nowadays.
It’s watching you..
Stepping on a lego.
I once stepped on the artificial eye (that had a lego style peg connection system) of a lodger I had…freaked me out big time!
Hahahahaha that’s so random !!
you have no idea
really freaked me out!
There is something a Bazillion times more annoying…
Windows 8 “Please Wait”
For what? What am I waiting for this time? What are you doing?
That’s why MS added the animation (be it copying, deleting, booting, etc…) to show that the machine hasn’t stalled, even though the progress bar might not be moving.
The Win 8 file manipulation bars are rather good though, showing copy rate, ETA and a nice graph too! Plus if there are any conflicts it copies/moves/deletes everything else first and asks you about them at the end!
Yep, even their SQL server data munching bar/circle is very progressively impressive, by then whole server has died and restarted.
Yeah, but does anyone remember the old pre Win XP download and file copy times? I’m fairly sure they were just numbers picked out of the sky!