GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 339876
Splash Screen Should be Optional
Last modified: 2018-06-29 21:02:37 UTC
In my opinion, splash screens are detrimental. They don't provide any useful information and get in the way. The common argument in favor of splash screens is that they tell the user the application is loading. My opinion is that if the user needs notification that an application is loading, that can be done at the desktop environment layer (or whatever else is launching the application). This way, it doesn't have to be done in every single application, and the type of notification can be customized without having to change every application. I'd like to see the GnuCash splash screen removed or at least made optional (with some sort of command line argument). Other information:
Thanks for reminding us of this issue. We try to follow the recommendations of the Gnome HIG in that respect, but it doesn't say anything about splash screens so far. Turns out there is a recent discussion about this on the usability mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2006-January/msg00124.html And the conclusion there is to discourage the use of splash screens. Quote: > The HIG doesn't mention them as far as I recall (updates to the HIG notwithstanding). Hmm, no, it doesn't, but discussions about them on these lists usually come out fairly strongly against. If an application is going to take a few seconds to start up, chances are you want to get on with something else while it's starting. Even if it's a well-behaved splash screen, that usually still means having to move or dismiss a window that's popped up in the way of what you were doing, which is always annoying. And of course, if the app isn't going to take a few seconds to start up, you don't need a splash screen anyway :) End quote. This is probably not a bug, but it's a valid enhancement request to reconsider this issue when time allows.
Created attachment 68951 [details] [review] Suggested patch Above patch adds a new setting show_splash_screen to the preferences dialog. Guess what it does... But it is a bit lame, it just makes gnc_gui_init_splash conditional. Is that ok?
Applied to trunk in r14579.
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