He's talking about smartphone app behavior, not the OS. A lot of good apps (with notable exceptions like Facebook and Kindle) work to minimize the "splash" by throwing up a graphic that looks like the UI, even while the app is loading and the UI (briefly) isn't even responsive to user input. I like it - it definitely smooths the transition into using that app.
This practice actually goes against the recommendation of iOS Human Interface Guidelines, although it doesn't seem like Apple actually enforces it:
Display a launch image that closely resembles the first screen
of the application. This practice decreases the
perceived launch time of your application.
Avoid displaying an About window or a splash screen.
In general, try to avoid providing any type of
startup experience that prevents people from using
your application immediately.
That's a bit surprising to me. I haven't noticed this (not much of an app person), do many apps use the recommended technique? Personally I would find a splash screen that looks like the first screen to be confusing.
Plenty do. The idea with that guideline is that it resembles the first screen the user sees, but in a "vague" manner - that is, maybe it just has the title bar and empty table view with no data filled in.
The idea is to give the user the impression the app has already started instantaneously, and you're just waiting for data to roll in to populate the UI.
Yeah, I'm using it in the project I've got in development right now -- actually sort of a hybrid approach. It's a grayed-out version of the main UI, with a "Loading..." message overlaid. I think that's a pretty common approach (graying it out, with or without an explicit message).
The app needs to load something close to 200 fonts (it's a design-oriented app). If they're not all present, the font choice list won't render properly. Lazy-loading isn't really an option -- otherwise the user will be sitting there watching the UI slooowwwlly render each font choice, one by one, while he waits to do something with them. Better to take the hit at startup, IMO, rather than making the user pause while he's in the middle of creating something.
All Apple apps (inbuilt or downloadable) follow this guideline. Amongst the non-Apple apps that follow it are Reeder, WhatsApp, Twitter, Sykpe (sort of), AIM, Shazaam, Instapaper and so on.
Good question - I understand that this is a lot harder for heavy professional apps, but I'm with the author in that I'd prefer a subtler transition. Maybe show me the rudiments of the interface (toolbars, menus, etc.) and a subtle progress bar for loading/opening the app and your last file.
I'm not sure how that's any better than a splash screen in fact I think it could cause much confusion.
I created a web app recently that had to make an Ajax call but could not allow any user input until this action had completed as various parts of the UI would have to be refreshed with new information.
I had reports from users that they thought the app had crashed since it wasn't responding to their inputs for a few seconds.
It turned out the best solution was to simply whiteout the entire page and show an animated egg timer until the action had completed.
It's only really heavy professional apps that take much time to start anyway.
