Splash screens == sloth

I don't understand what he's angry about. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, these are all enormously complicated programs that require resources to load. That doesn't make them bloatware and it doesn't make the programmers lazy.<p>His proposed solution sucks too. Show the UI while it's loading so the user can impotently click around waiting for the program to "turn on". Windows does this when it boots up and it drives me insane -- if the OS or program isn't in a usable state when you show it to me, <i>don't show it to me</i><p>Loading speed is just one of a multitude of factors that come into play when making software. According to this Adobe employee it should be the chief most concern, even dominating other things like features, usability, UX, cost, technological debt, etc.

This weekend the 3G mysteriously stopped working on my iPhone, so after months of use, I rebooted it. Rebooting the iPhone takes 1+ minute, and there _is_ a kind of splash screen shown during that time. The reason it appears instantenous during normal use is that it doesn't actually boot or load, it just turns the display back on. Also, many iOS apps actually have splash screens, you just don't see them very often as they're usually already running in the background (big apps like Facebook, and even small ones like PCalc Lite or Quotes).<p>You can kind of achieve this with Windows + Adobe stuff too. Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster.<p>Of course the OP is right, Adobe stuff is bloatware and sucks. Fortunately for non-pro designers, there are alternatives like Pixelmator and Paint.NET.

Boo and/or hiss. If you hate splash screens, use simpler tools or get more RAM. When Photoshop finishes loading, it's ready to kick ass. The Finder, on the other hand, taunts with its almost-readiness. Faking readiness is far worse than setting and honoring expectations.

I hate Adobe software with passion.<p>I used to love Macromedia Fireworks, so that I bought a copy of Fireworks after Adobe acquired Macromedia. I had to jump through some crazy hoops to prove that I did not steal the product, and that was nothing compared to what I had to do after buying a new computer – it turns out that I was supposed to unactivate the product on the old one and then activate on the new one. This is not what you do to your customers. I don’t even want to start on the issue of software quality or customer service (I once did the mistake of trying to report an i13n issue with my copy of Fireworks).<p>I swore there’s not going to be any software by Adobe on my computer anymore, and I even disabled Flash in my primary browser. I am lucky that I can do with the new wave of Mac graphics editors like Pixelmator. I was so happy paying for that product on the Mac App Store, getting a copy and <i>doing nothing else</i> that would require it to work. I was so happy that it starts immediately, that is has a decent UI. It’s not feature complete, it’s got its own bugs, but it’s a software and experience I am willing to pay for. Unlike Adobe. (Which is a company I once liked, being a typography geek and typesetting our school magazine in an old copy of PageMaker.)

<i>A splash screen basically tells me, in very clear-cut terms, that my time is worth nothing whatsoever. It's a fresh reminder that users' needs don't count as much as programmer convenience does.</i><p>So... how much IS your time worth? How much extra would you be willing to pay for instantly-responsive applications? Programmer time isn't free, either.

I ranted about this a few days ago. My favorite idiocy on Windows is their background "optimization" of .Net binaries.<p><a href="https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412838.aspx?Redirected=true" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412...</a><p>This service appears to perform a large number of I/O requests (probably reading/writing a large number of small files). It will totally consume the disk seek capacity, massively slowing down every other program that is also doing disk I/O (e.g., freezing Firefox awesomebar searches).<p>The programmers at the linked blog congratulate themselves on how this mayhem lasts only 10 minutes on a typical computer.<p>Note: I do not have an SSD. :( This and other idiocies will force me to get one next time.

I for one prefer seeing splash screen for couple of seconds[1] rather than having laggy/half-functional UI appear instantly. Actually I'm more annoyed by Windows login, which shows desktop early while it's still starting up background apps, and thus being unusably slow.<p>And the comparisons to mobile devices are just ridiculous. At least in my use, I'd estimate that on average apps on my desktop launch much more quickly than on my Android phone. And I challenge anyone to find a smartphone that boots up faster than a fresh Windows 7 install on a SSD (or even on a regular HDD).<p>[1] I just timed: Photoshop 5 seconds, Word 2 seconds, both from warm caches. And that's with a 4 year old budget laptop.

Whether or not the programmers of Photoshop can make their app run faster, I have to say it's pretty sad that waiting 10 seconds is worth whining about. I understand this is unacceptable for a web app's page load time, but for a desktop app that loads an enormous amount of resources <i>once</i> before letting you use it seems acceptable to me.<p>I think the real problem is that we are all so incredibly spoiled that waiting 10s is a <i>huge inconvenience</i>. I'm not saying it's not annoying. I don't like it either... that squirming feeling you get when you expect something to be fast and it isn't. But, like, get over it.<p>On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most important issue in the cosmos, waiting 10 seconds for an app to load would be about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 (if that). Perhaps there are more important things to write about.

&#62;When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.<p>what phone does he use? every phone that I know of takes at least two minutes to come up from a cold start, and has for the last ten years...

What's the big deal? Showing a splash screen for less than 5 seconds (oh yeah, get an SSD) until everything initializes is better than opening a non-functioning UI ("the cloud" is not a solution - what are you going to do when your connection goes bad?). It would be nice to not have it, but for such a bloated program as Photoshop or After Effects, it's pretty much expected...

"Just don't quit Photoshop when you're done using it, and don't turn the computer off, put it to sleep. If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster."<p>My experience in OS X is that Photoshop has to be restarted very frequently or it just eats up more and more memory until it uses it all. Seems like bad memory management.

The title made it seem like this was going to be more of an whistle-blowing blog post by an insider.<p>Nevertheless, this kind of rant is interesting in so far as it points to what I think a growing momentum behind the UNIX philosophy. What I mean by that is: small programs that do one thing well and interoperate with others.<p>I wonder whether the underlying cause of this shift in thinking is the levelling off of CPU cycle speeds. Time was when the performance of something like Photoshop or Office would just prompt you to buy a better computer. People would assume their computer had gotten old or out of date. Now that getting new hardware doesn't magically fix things people are asking why certain things take so long and comparing programs' performance.

A lot of people here seem to think that complaining about a five to six second start time is just whining. I believe you're wrong -- it is a legitimate and valid complaint and here's why:<p>Most software can't run for very long. A lot of high-end software can be /very/ unstable (hello, Maya! ;-). The user is not just starting that software once at the beginning of the day for a long productive day of work, they are all to often starting it again after a crash. Or after they shut it down to get enough RAM to run Excel. Or after rebooting Windows for /another/ mandatory update from IT.<p>I once had to restart a particular high-end compositing package thirty times in an hour. Twenty seconds of the average two minutes were spent staring at the splash screen. But I had to do it, because I needed thirty frames rendered and a particular plugin crashed after running one frame.<p>The user is not starting your software to admire your credits or the clever graphic design of your logo. They are starting your software to /use/ it get a job done, a job that they have in mind to do and any distraction at all (even a harmless splash screen) is a new stumbling block on their way to resuming their task.<p>I heard of a study done back in the mainframe days that determined that anything that took less than two seconds felt instantaneous to the user. However, anything longer (even five seconds!) took "forever". In my years of programming, I have found nothing to disprove this (possibly) apocryphal conclusion.<p>Your user's time is valuable. Your user's mental state and flow are valuable. As programmers on Hacker News, we all know about concentration and flow, right? Extend your users the same courtesy you expect from your tools. Help them keep things going, don't break their rhythm and don't let them lose context.

I'm not sure I'm a big fan of what it would take to fix this. Namely, "speed loaders" that sit in memory and eat up RAM. I've already seen what adobe's PDF speed loader can do on a system.<p>Frankly, I'll manage my applications myself.<p>Are you tired of waiting for Photoshop to launch? You might want to try leaving it open...

Louis CK has a fantastic rant about people complaining about technology being too slow (and technology, in general). It helped to put my own rage in perspective. I find myself getting less pissed at technology since watching it, and I kind of hope that lasts.<p>(NSFW)<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&#38;feature=related" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxL5umOE6g&#38;feature=relat...</a>

The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in 2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in 2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And I'm sure that the binaries for importing camera raw images don't come anywhere close to accounting for all the bloat in that time.)<p>So, my computers have gotten better and better, while the demands I place on them have remained basically constant, yet boot time stays the same. The only thing I can think to blame is bloat.

As much as I hate bloat and love svelte web apps that do just what I need and nothing more... I think we also need to accept that some people in some fields of work do pretty advanced stuff, and need pretty advanced software to do that stuff.<p>Adobe InDesign in particular is a huge piece of software with tons of config options and obscure features and what-not, but I've never ever found a feature that made me think "what kind of useless, bloated bullshit is this?" I think Adobe teams fight very hard against bloat, but their business is based around power users and that just leads to a different kind of software.

This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life, where you have 16 milliseconds to do <i>everything</i> and it pays to be smart, use clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry (he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company producing software for the film industry.<p>It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the country chasing a <i>real</i> programming job again...

I don't use photoshop, but my emacs takes 3-5 sec to boot up.<p>So lets see. Supposing I use emacs for 3 hours, 5 seconds is precisely 0.04% of the time I spent using it. I'd prefer if the emacs dev team focuses on new features for me to use during the other 99.96% of the time I spend using it.<p>Iphone/Android apps are fast because they need to be. Often you use them for 30sec-5 min. On a 30 second use, 5 seconds is 16% of the time you spend using the app.

With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for weeks at a time. There's not much downside in doing this besides some extra clutter in your dock/taskbar. For any fairly modern machine an upgrade to SSD + 8GB of RAM will mostly solve the problem. That's about $250-$300 to avoid the problem almost entirely. I feel like this is a byproduct of the race to the bottom of PCs over the last 5 years or so. Just because you <i>can</i> buy a $500 computer with a spinning disk and 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you <i>should</i> buy it. There are trade-offs to consider.<p>Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10 second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants 2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.

The video game industry has the same issue. Initial bloat screens. A lot.<p>Skyrim for instance, it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to load the initial screen, which is just the logo of Bethesda. You know what is on the initial screen. A button for me to click that says Start. Once I click that button, then I have to hit Continue for it to load the last save point. Then another 30 seconds to 1 minute to load my game/map point.<p>So basically, two actions and over a minute later, I am finally in the game. A much easier thing would be to just load my last save/map point. I can turn on the console, and know to come back in a minute. Just have it paused until I am ready to play. If I wanted to say restart the entire game, I could go into the menu system from there.<p>I find this the case on almost all games. FIFA, Madden, Bad Company, Call of Duty. Just start the game I played last. If I regularly play online, go and find me a server automatically. Auto load my game, unless I hold down the start button or some other button that would then default to the menu.<p>I don't care that Bethesda or EA made my game, I just want to play.

I suppose this is a good place to mention that I wasted 2 hours of my day zeroing my MBR because of Adobe. Apparently Photoshop installs some DRM crap on it.<p>Proof: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-CS4-VERSION/dp/B001EUDGO2" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Photoshop-Extended-CS4-VERSION/d...</a><p>Proof: <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254" rel="nofollow">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661254</a><p>I will not be using an Adobe product other than Flash again. I would ditch Flash as well, but last time I checked, gnash was not good enough to replace it yet. That's not an issue though. I'll just wait for HTML5 to kill it.

<i>Imagine if your phone or iPad took as long to boot as a Windows laptop. Would you use it? Would it be usable?</i><p>My android phone (Nexus S) takes longer than my 6 year old Windows laptop do (sure, it's updated with an SSD but even without it would be a close call), my mothers tablet isn't faster either. Solution? I never turn either off. Problem solved.<p>Hibernate for longer sessions, sleep if battery isn't important and I know I will use it for the next few days.<p>On my workstation I never turn off heavy applications anyway. On my laptop I'm limited by my 32 bit Win7 OS so that's a burden, but I can work with it. The 8 GB I have in my workstation isn't ideal either, tempted to get a 24 or 32 GB machine but probably can't justify replacing the current machine just yet. I see no reason to get less RAM on a new setup though.<p>Also I really appreciate having the whole application ready. Having parts of it lazy-load can be way more agonizing than a slow boot. And with an SSD you don't have to wait long anyway, I always tend to fiddle with other windows during the boot so I'm not that annoyed. The splash screen itself can be annoying if it claims window focus or is just in the way but they exist for a reason. There should something telling me that the application is booting (firing up a task manager doesn't count), I agree that there are less obtrusive ways for this than a splash screen though and for that OS developers should be blamed for not realizing this.

My computer is pretty responsive, at least as much as my smartphone is and I'm not running anything special (No SSD, 4GB of RAM and an older model of quad core).<p>Ok, I wait maybe 2-3 minutes for the computer to start (not even that if I just put it to sleep instead of turning it off). I can work for ~8-10 hours so those minutes aren't a big deal.<p>There are a few programs that are particularly slow to start (eclipse, steam, openoffice) but that's mostly just because there is a lot of code to load and I'm sure a comparable application for a smartphone would be just as slow.<p>I do run Linux most of the time though so there is probably a bias there towards smaller non-monolithic programs there and not having registry bloat helps.<p>However I still remember the days of Windows 98 and how horribly slow everything was back then on anything apart from a freshly installed machine and having to wait a full minute for Office 97 to start, we've come a long way since those days. I can't see it taking long before every PC comes with an SSD drive (which is probably part of the reason smartphones seem responsive as well as having a well warmed cache).<p>As for doing something like running a cloud instance of the program and then somehow syncing back to the desktop app seemlessly, that seems like it would add such an insane level of extra complexity and problems which is exactly what he seems to be against.

Many people here are talking about how iOS works vs a desktop OS and that's the big difference - but its not about the SSD. If you have a high powered computer then its no problem to leave the adobe suite running and then just grab it from the task bar and get to work. The issue is that most people don't have high powered computers, at least powerful enough to run photoshop constantly while doing other things (HD videos, netflix, chrome+firefox, etc…. non work things). Adobe and other big software companies are going to continue to push the envelope no matter how fast our computers get in terms of resource use.<p>Has photoshop gotten faster in our lifetimes? No! It just wants more and more resources with every release. So what is the difference between how apps behave on iOS and how they behave on the desktop? Backgrounding. Very very few apps (ableton live is one that has some "freeze" type features) don't have any way for you to shut down portions of the app or put the app to sleep so that you can start it up quickly. On iOS this is how apps are expected to behave, and it shows.<p>But, even if Apple did bring backgrounding to the desktop, I imagine Adobe would be one of the last to support it - and I only say this because of my previous personal experience with Adobe products like Flex, LCCS, etc…<p>I just thank code I'm not a designer...

What is so hard for people to understand ? Photoshop needs time to load, because that time is quite significant they give you some kind of feedback to let you know that 'hey the damn thing is loading, please wait', what's so bad with that? what would the alternative be?<p>The title starting with "Adobe employee" tries to make it sound like its a significant opinion regarding the matter, the author of the article doesn't seem to be a programmer or holding a position that deals with the process of making a program, what's even worst is the fact that he is completely clueless regarding the matter, he suggest "e.g., show a UI right away and let an instance of the program in the cloud operate against my gestures, until the local copy boots fully and can re-sync with me", seriously ??? I started wondering if i am being trolled at that point.<p>It takes 4 seconds to do a cold start of Photoshop on my laptop (which isn't a top notch laptop), on an older computer and with previous versions of Photoshop it would take 10-15seconds which would still be fine, the process doesn't block me from doing something else in the mean time.

I still use Photoshop 6.0 circa 1999. It loads in a few seconds max, and it has all the core functionality necessary for web graphics work. In fact, even PS 5.5 would do fine because it was the first version that supported Save for Web.<p>If you are using the latest version of Photoshop for web work only, you are wasting time and money for tons of features you don't really need.

I was hoping Adobe would patch Photoshop CS4 on OSX Lion so it stops crashing when quitting, and then hanging indefinitely if you try to re-launch it again without rebooting first. It's the most expensive software I've ever purchased which doesn't know how to [NSApp terminate:nil]; properly.

They could at least display "tip of the day" or hotkeys while you are waiting to make the waiting time at least a bit productive. Why don't programs have this today? Most old programs had this but after starting up. Displaying it while the program is loading would be much smarter.

Every, I'd say, 6 months or so, someone on the qemu mailing list posts a patch to add a splash screen to qemu.<p>I don't understand why people persist in this:<p>(1) Most hypervisor start-up screens aren't even seen by most users.<p>(2) Spend that time and effort making the boot faster, not slowing it down with utterly useless stuff!

While as a programmer I understand that perhaps this load time could be improved, and maybe splash screens are a lazy solution, but I wonder if it warrants this level of anger. Even assuming a generous 5 minute load time on photoshop (I don't know as I don't use it, but I doubt it's that much), and that you reload twice a day (once at the beginning of the day and maybe once after lunch), and you use it every weekday of the year, that's still less than 0.5% of your year.<p>I'm not saying losing 43 hours of your life per year is insignificant, but a proportional response seems appropriate. You in all likelihood spend more time waiting at red lights.

5-10 seconds? This guy is complaining about 5-10 seconds?<p>I hate bloatware. I despise behavior like the sloth and neglect Microsoft inflicted on Windows XP once Vista shipped and I loathe the abandonment of gingerbread phones like my late Droid G1 (unaffectionately nicknamed "the brick" in its final days) by Google once they entered the crunch phase for ICS, but 5 to 10 seconds?!?!?!?<p>Get a grip... If an app has any mandatory online component whatsoever (not that photoshop does), its boot time is unavoidably non-deterministic. Good luck fixing that (not that there's any excuse for avoiding latency that <i>can</i> be avoided)...

In all fairness, Photoshop startup time did get <i>a lot</i> faster at version 10 (CS3), when they changed the type system to load only when needed.<p>But yes, there is still a long way to go. I don't think we need iOS like hacks such as showing a PNG of the GUI to trick you into thinking loading is done. This solution has its own set of issues (responsiveness, not precisely matching your previous state in case of crash, etc). It's x1000 faster than my phone, we can do better.<p>Modularizing, as shown above, is hard, but probably the best way to go. As programs grown to the size of a small OS, they should be treated as such.

Photoshop CS5 took roughly 4 seconds to start on my MBA. Is this guy seriously complaining about 4 seconds? Several popular iOS (and I'm sure there are some on Android as well) take longer than that to load...

What I find interesting is a story about Firefox Mobile. It used to get complaints about it being slow to load and that it needed to be sped up. The solution to this was that during load the browser would display an image of the browser as it is when loaded instead of just a black screen as it previously had. Complaints about slow loading screens decreased dramatically. So yeah, I'll be keeping this sort of thing in mind. This was all relayed to me from someone who attended the Firefox Mobile talk at FOSDEM.

OP has a point. Not a f*cing important point, but a point. UIs can and should be faster, Adobe and MS are slow to catch on with current user expectations, and splash screens are annoying relics of a bygone era of bloated desktop UIs.<p>Agreed.<p>But in the end, to me it's just one more instance of Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk</a><p>I guess I just don't get the tone. Why the righteous indignation? This not Human Rights we're talking about, it's software.

I wonder how Kas Thomas feels about the credit roll that occurs at the start of a movie? You know the one where they show the logo of the movie studio, then the production company, then the producer, editor, et al.<p>I see the software splash screen in the same light. It is giving credit to those who have put it together. Now, obviously entertainment is different then a work application, but many of us feel that software is art, just like a movie and that if someone wants to do a credit role then they should.

Network-reliant apps should check for connectivity during loading, this can take a few seconds to verify everything. Would he rather the app doesn't do any environment validation and present errors when trying to run specific tasks? Can you imagine, working on a complex document only to find out when saving that you don't have enough disk space or your network connection isn't valid. Splash-screens are an important time to determine whether everything is there that you need to do.

Photoshop really is not <i>that</i> complex - you could write a photoshop clone that would load in under a second, easily. But it loads all sorts of stuff you do not need up front - many fonts, textures, drivers for scanners, cameras, and so forth. I think the real problem is that Adobe seems to keep patching an already bloated code base - I think if they started fresh they could redesign it more efficiently...just my humble opinion...

Splash screens are leftovers from the old-old days of text-based computing when you had to mask the fact that the program being loaded was going to take awhile (&#62;30 secs).<p>Hardware, software, network, total users, i/o, it didn't matter, it was better to say something than let users sit there at a terminal thinking nothing's happening.<p>Or worse, tell their boss the "system's down again."<p>No excuse for them today. They just say "big app", it's gonna be awhile.

when I read this I instantaneously thought about this rant from Louis CK [Everythings Amazing &#38; Nobodys Happy] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk</a><p>Linux Mint and Windows 7 take 10 seconds to boot on my laptop with a SSD. That's amazing. Just a few months ago I would go make a sandwich while my PC would boot. If you have a problem with splash screens alt tab to the browser of your choice. If you think your PC boots to slow take out your smartphone and play with it. This is not to say developers should be wasteful with users time. Especially web developers know how import page speed is. But it's a complex program just give it a few SECONDS.<p>Also one should mention Steam (the game distribution platform). If you are bored in between rounds you just bring up the steam panel and use the embedded browser to browse the web or chat with friends. But those at times minute long delays. Sure you could embed a email client in the OS the comes up long before the main GUI is loaded but you wont get to read much in 10 seconds.

Solution: don't use monolithic applications with bloated GUIs. Instead, use small, simple tools, driven from the command line where possible. If the problem domain is naturally graphical, have a lightweight graphical frontend driving the small simple tools through shellouts or a plugin or library interface.<p>In other words, use UNIX.<p>This isn't difficult to understand, guys.

I used to adore Adobe, but it all changed over time. It started when I only needed Photoshop, and yet Adobe insisted I install several other chunks of software for services I didn't want or need. In the end, I finally found a solution that lets me get my work done without all the excess Adobe bloatware. Thank you Pixelmator!

A splash screen seems like a pretty innocuous way of letting you know that the app is not ignoring you. I imagine that not too many people take such violent aesthetic offense to them as this guy. Still, they probably allow a longer load time than users would otherwise find acceptable in their absence.

At least they aren't following the movie industry's model of forcing you to watch paid advertisements first...

What a troubled and complex world we live in, when large, complex programs take 5-10 seconds to load.<p>I'd much rather my devs work on useful features instead of trying to fool me into thinking my productivity suite is loaded a few seconds earlier (and also not dealing with all the bugs that that introduces).

I hate it when people say "I switch my phone on and it starts instantly". No it doesn't. My iphone takes about a minute to start...of course I never switch it off, so it's not a problem.<p>If you never "turn off" Photoshop or Office, they too will appear the instant you click on them. Amazing!

Don't you think it's odd he is complaining about splash screens when Adobe is responsible for the worst thing to ever happen to the web -- those stupid flash intros ? Talk about a waste of time, you had to <i>wait for the time waster to load and then wait for it to play</i>

I agree with him, in principal, that apps should be lighter and faster. However, Photoshop is just a giant program to do lots of complex things. It's a burden I'm willing to put up with (for now) because I have yet to make a transition to a similar, lighter, program.

For One time if you see splash screen its not a problem. But for example if visual studio crashes so often and it makes you see to splash so often then as author mentioned i would feel like i would commit seppuku. They should try caching or something .

Figure this is the right time to ask about SSDs .. Any recommendations for MBP SSDs?

About loading screens, I've always wondered why games don't try to get rid of these (maybe they do?).<p>Anyone familiar with why you have to have loading screens in games? Would it be possible to pre-load a level while you're playing?

Another point is file size. Is it really necessary, that every version is twice as big (just estimating...) as its predecessor?<p>At least for many websites this trend has been stopped, due to mobile requirements.

I remember there was Photoshop clone called Pixel which was doing cold startup in less than 1 second, so Photoshop slugginess is definitely not caused by technical limitations.

I await his next blog post "I got fired for throwing all my toys out the pram" with great anticipation, where he explains how throwing a massive hissy fit and not taking his (some good) points up with the team and management.<p>I don't agree with this faking rubbish though, if it's not usable then I don't care. There's plenty of bloatware to get rid of in these programs, I doubt the splash screen is the biggest of worries!

I don't think the guy will lose his job. Do you? He is addressing a very real issue. Adobe should read this.

The WCMS he works on also has significant startup time, even beyond JVM warm-up. Ah well.

With an SSD drive photoshop loads very fast. It only takes about 2 seconds.

I don't think I've even seen a splash screen since SSDs became affordable in the past 2 years. Also I'm a "give credit where it's due" type of guy and surnames of people that made the great project I'm launching don't bother me.<p>This whole blog post reminds me of the "first world problems" meme.

I stopped reading at "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud"

Adobe is the definition of bloat.

if gimp can insta-load, and photoshop gives me a 60 second splash screen, designers are still going to use photoshop. i would prefer Adobe continues to invest in the features that matter, not startup times.

hey, I have a solution. Buy a damn SSD if you want to load a 1GB program faster.

SSD, problem solved.

&#62;Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop.<p>They tried this, everyone got pissed off and asked for a splash screen so they knew it was loading.