GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 640335
Splash screen & app icon should match Mac OS X UI conventions
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:52:46 UTC
The splash screen has two problems on Mac OS X: Firstly, it should not exist. Most Mac OS X applications do not display splash screens. The icon bouncing in the dock serves as an "application loading" indicator, which does not distract from doing other tasks until the application is ready. Secondly, the splash screen displays on top of all other windows even if GnuCash is not itself the frontmost application. This severely interferes with doing other tasks while GnuCash loads, and I see no reason it should not be changed even if the splash screen continues to exist. I am aware that there is a “Show splash screen” preference. Therefore, I am requesting that: 1. The application icon should remain bouncing until GnuCash has finished loading. 2. The splash screen should be in the normal window layer rather than being in front. 3. The splash screen preference should default to off on Mac OS X.
Have you any idea how to do #1? I've been looking through the Apple documentation and haven't found anything that indicates what stops it bouncing.
Generally, the icon stops bouncing when the application enters its main event loop. If the Cocoa API is relevant, then take a look at the documentation of the -finishLaunching method of NSApplication. I believe “unhighlights the application’s icon” is a NeXT-legacy description of this effect.
Yeah, I saw that. Gtk-quartz runs its own event loop, and that has to start before even the plugins are loaded, so there may be no way to keep the dock icon bouncing other than to set a user attention request, which is pretty hackish.
That would be worse than nothing. The user attention request is a different, more eye-catching bounce, and also may have additional behavior such as speech (Speech preferences > Announce wen an application requires your attention).
#2 has been done. #1 doesn't seem to be possible. #3 concerns me in that a new user might think that Gnucash has crashed, because it can take so long to load, particularly with a large dataset.
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