I’m wasting time posting here because I am bored waiting on an MS Word document to load from an HTML file. It’s about 85 pages long, with 125 images. This is the second time I have tried to load it, and I am 10 minutes in.
It occurred to me this morning that email, chat windows, newsgroups (yeah, I am dating myself here), blogs, etc., are NOT the real, underlying trigger for wasting time. My bookshelves are full of books I want to read and yet haven’t read. I have magazines I haven’t read, DVDs I haven’t watched, recipes uncooked, the list goes on. But these don’t distract me.
No, what really distracts me is ill-behaved software:
- A web application that requires an open, active window, else the page is reloaded for saving again with a helpful “Your most recent work needs to be saved.” When I work on anything more than non-trivial documents, I have to leave that browser window open. If the server side is a little slow, I have two options: 1. Distract myself doing something else, like chatting, or 2. simply close my eyes and sit very still waiting until it’s done, however long that takes.
- “Save As…” dialog for a popular note taking application written in Java takes quite a lot of time to load, like more than a minute. Switching away from this application could result in lost work. I close my eyes, and I wait. Maybe I’ll stop using it. [5/13/2009 I have]
- A closely related annoyance: waiting on Windows to automatically update after I shutdown the computer. Windows informs me I must not “turn off” the computer while it is automatically updating. Well, fine. Sometimes I have 20 minutes to wait, sometimes, I power it down immediately because I have more important things to do than wait on a computer. I’ll take my chances on having it boot correctly. It usually does. When I say I power it down, I mean that if Windows refuses to shut off fast enough, I’ll unplug it and remove the battery.
- There’s more I am sure. Maybe I’ll post them later. Maybe not.
The common theme here is that a large number of application software for browsers or for MS Windows requires undivided attention from the user. This includes paying attention while you are waiting for the software to perform whatever minor miracle is in it’s queue.
It’s not supposed to be this way.
The vast majority of my distractions at the computer are induced by WAITING. And not by anything else.
And that MS Word file still hasn’t finished loading.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
>> “Save As…” dialog for a popular note taking application written in Java takes quite of time to load, like more than a minute.
AHA! You don’t mention what note taking application this is (I don’t know of many particularly popular java desktop apps – jEdit, maybe?), but this probably isn’t the app’s fault, it’s rather a Java/Swing problem I’ve seen occur over here with our own apps.
Your application is probably opening a JFileChooser, and on some systems (I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue on my own box, despite trying to replicate the necessary conditions), when a JFileChooser is first loaded, there’s a HUGE spike in activity from the javaw.exe process. In fact, when one coworker complained that the “Open…” dialog was coming up very slowly, I ran filemon (great tool from Sysinternals, now Microsoft) and filtered for file operations made by javaw.exe. The result surprised me: the javaw process was reading and going through each and every .zip and .jar file on the Desktop (and this user had many).
Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time on my coworker’s machine to investigate further (I would love to get to the bottom of this), but we deleted all the zip files stored in his Desktop and My Documents folders, and the JFileChooser dialogs instantly started loading up much faster.
It’s FreeMind, which I otherwise really like. I didn’t want to rag on it because I really get a lot of use out of it and complaining feels unseemly! Java… heh… I could go on and on… but I won’t.