Progress bars on computers—what are they good for if they don't show you actual progress, e.g., when downloading a big file? Progress bars are, in my opinion, no good if
- they zip rapidly up to 99%, then just hover there for minutes on end.
- they zip to the end... then restart and zip to the end again, doing this several times.
You guys who make progress bars: make them follow the appropriate narrative structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement. Don't make the progress bar mimic your attempts at sex, either getting you close to climax but never achieving it, or getting you to climax so fast that you have to have several short sessions in a row.
Most application progress bars are pretty good these days, though, no? I get what you're saying about the bar zipping to the end multiple times, but in my experience that is usually because it is measuring the progress of one step in a more complicated process. I don't remember what program it was, but I do remember seeing a dual bar--one for the current step and one for the overall installation. That was the holy grail of progress bars.
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