regulating progress bars
Permit me to think like a user here, instead of a programmer. I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. Progress bars should be regulated like a public utility. They should be measured like the dispense rate at the gas pumps or at the butcher's scale. There should be a little sticker next to each one that tells the user who inspected it last, and what date.
Is it just me, or would you agree that ever since progress bars were invented, 99% of actual time goes into waiting for the last 1% of the progress to finish. Right now I'm installing MSDN in order to use help for Visual Studio. It says "Removing Backup Files... this should take several minutes." It has. My beef is that the progress bar shows only one tick left, out of oh perhaps 30 ticks total. I'm not picking on MSDN. Everyone does this. Of course I know why. My point is just because everyone else does it (shows a progress bar), doesn't mean you have to blow your credibility with your user with your app as well by leading them down the same garden path.
Speaking of credibility, I have a great time reading gapingvoid. For a while I only got the cartoons, but recently I reformed and now have the full rss including commentary. The company has some business cards you can order that are decidedly not for business. I'm keeping it in the back of my mind for my 6 month packaging retreat. You thought I was kidding about that! Yes, 6 months just working on how things look. What a loonybird.