[Pan-users] Launch feedback, splash screen?

[Duncan]

I really enjoyed the faster start times on some of the versions a bit ago, 
with group loading in the background.  However, I did see the confusion it 
caused when a user loaded a group that wasn't fully loaded by PAN yet, and 
there were mentions of even worse race conditions, so reverting to the 
preloading was probably for the best.

However, that doesn't mean it's good when PAN takes so long to start with no 
indication of what's happened, for those of us with large caches.  Some sort 
of a splash screen might be nice, to give some indication of what's going on.  
Just showing the PAN about box (which could possibly be dressed up with a 
mascot image or something,  image of PAN?) with an additional "Loading 
messages..." line would work.  Since some folks don't like splash screens, it 
should be a toggleable option.  Ideally, it would have a progress bar across 
the bottom, so the user could watch the load progress, but that's more chrome 
than absolutely necessary.

This would be a nice touch, particularly since PAN is now being ported to the 
MSWormOS world, where users have come to expect such dialogs, if a program 
load will take some time.  I usually turned them off, because the program 
didn't take that long to load on my system, but if it took as long to load as 
PAN does, it was useful information.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin