Early this week I spent an hour or two adding a nice splash screen to Braun. I thought it would give the application a sense of polish and professionalism, and give the user something to look at whilst the app was loading. A day later I spent 10 minutes removing it!
I came to the conclusion that splash screens are basically bad! They should only be used as an absolute last resort if your application really does take an intolerably long time to load or you have some very important information to convey to the user during the load process. Furthermore, if your application takes a long time to load, you should consider fixing this and maybe loading the GUI before loading some of the other components.
In fact this was the case with Braun: rather than adding a splash screen to ‘cover up’ the slow load time, I just changed the start-up order, so that the slow-starting OSC server gets run after the GUI has launched. No need for a splash screen. It doesn’t matter how good your splash screen looks - users don’t want to see it.
The majority of the applications I just tested on either Linux or OS X, don’t have splash screens, but here are some of the remaining offenders:
- OpenOffice
- Gimp
- The Eclipse IDE
- Quicksilver (!)
- Max/MSP
Come on folks, sort out your application launch times — we don’t want to look at your splash screens, regardless of how pretty they are, how long they took to implement, or how much the designer cost you.
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