Grouse: Progress bars

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Progress bar really annoy me ... especially whey then don't actually reflect reality.

I'm currently on a train going from York to Manchester in the UK and I'm trying to update my GPS with some maps I omitted ... and the software has been showing 100% complete on the "Index rebuild" for the maps for the past 10 minutes ... the progress bars showed decent progress for a while, but stopped at 100% and didn't go on to the next step.

Seems to me that, with a good progress bar, you should never actually see it get to 100% because it should immediately move on to the next step.

'Course lack of progress bars is even more annoying ... when my Tivo boots up it just tells me that it's starting up ... and then it switches to a screen that says "Almost there, just a few minutes more" ... but I've had situations (with my old S2 tivo) where it actually hung up at that step and showed me the "just a few minutes more" screen for more than an hour.

I really wish programs would tell me WHAT they are doing, even in general terms (perhaps with an option to give me technical details), while they are working.  At least I can tell that something is actually happening.  Fedora Linux has a great boot up screen, imo, it defaults to a general screen that indicates what's happening ... with the option to show the details.

david