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The Splash Screen, so long beloved of dev’s on Windows, looks to be on its last legs. The passing of an era, the mark of a vintage app, the deaths knell for artistic flair or good riddance?
Some folks would definitely go with the latter. Some state that they can tell the quality of an application by virtue of the fact it has a splash screen at all. They claim the splash screen is there to mask incompetent and ugly coding practices and to fool the user into thinking something important is actually happening.
Yep, we’ve read those comments, perhaps pondered them, or ignored them or thought about our own applications – and shut our mouths. 
Personally I say bunk!
Yep. It’s total absolute bunk. It’s a maledicted generalization that may have some basis in some instances, but like all such generalizations fails with numerous exceptions. Clearly dev’s who spout this nonsense have never had to work with loading heavy dll’s, database libraries and files or had to struggle with users who have sub standard or even over loaded CPU’s and RAM. Even systems with modern CPU’s can (and do) fail to deliver when something like Symantec’s Internet Suite is busy guzzling CPU cycles like some kind of neurotic, byte consuming camel – which is most of the time for that and similar “suites”. Got two cores? Hold the fort and baton down the mobo, your anti-virus/firewall buddy is going to splice itself into one of each thanks!
The purpose of the splash screen was originally to provide clear visual feedback to the user that something was actually happening. The program (or the operating system) hadn’t gone to the land of Nod, the keyboard hadn’t locked up or the graphics card hadn’t frozen and normal services would be restored in… sometime under 30 seconds.
Or was it? Certainly we’ve used that excuse for almost two decades now. But the splash screen became much more – quickly. It became branding. It branded the product right into your brain. Who could forget the green splash screen with the sailing ship’s wheel of Netscape Navigator? Or the jigsaw puzzles of MS Office? Or the super arty screens of high end graphics programs. Nor can we forget Borland’s Athena.
Microsoft has now joined Apple in stating the splash screen is a no-no in most situations for most applications.
Though there are exceptions of course, programs that take a long time to load, for starters, oh – and of course Vista itself, which makes no bones about a startup splash when the OS is loading up into RAM – using every micro-second purely for the purpose of loading essential stuff like device drivers, utilities, services, license checks – and brand awareness. Oops – I mean user awareness that something is happening. 
So should we splash in our own applications? Should we follow the advice of the OS vendors (MS and Apple) and just load, fast as we can, with no indication?
Splashing on the Mac has been pretty much out since OS X was released and not always that common on OS 9 and 8 (compared to Windows where dev’s were and are clearly addicted). However, the Mac has those cute little bouncing icons on the taskbar, a visual clue to the user that all is well in program loading land and in just a moment, all things being equal, bouncing icon will stop and program will appear. But not on Windows, no bouncing icons there, just some cursors that many users fail to intuit.
I’ll never forget the reaction of a supposed power user (IT trainer) when I showed him the Beta for Windows 95 (his first look, I was testing). Some software was loading, little arrow with the hourglass combination cursor appears and he says: “Yeah – I’ll bet!” He really couldn’t really explain what he meant to me. From what I could tell from his babbling he thought it represented speed, not the process of multi-tasking or more specifically multi-threading. It’s worse now too as the majority of users have never worked in a process swapping environment like Windows 16 bit let alone the single instance environment of DOS.
So edicts are fine from Microsoft, but how are they addressing intuition by the user?
Given MS borrowed liberally (sorry for using the ”l” word to any Republican readers here <g>) from OS X for many of Vista’s graphical elements why not bouncing icons?
It’s not that I’ve got this thing for bouncing or anything, but an indication surely isn’t to much to ask for if you’re asking dev’s to abandon their beloved branding – er – splash screens? Particularly now that Windows supports transparent regions on forms and users can see their favorite applications splash screen, like their pirating software, I mean file sharing software, like LemonWire in the shape of a freshly cut lemon? It’s just not fair!
So back to the question at hand, should we splash our programs on startup?
I’d love to hear what folks reading think. Personally I think it’s horses for courses. I don’t mind splash screens, I’ve included them in the past and probably will where I think they are needed in the future, and of course being able to turn them off for the cranky bums who don’t like them, well that’s only fair – I guess! ?
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