Even without asking, let alone taking a survey, I think I speak for a lot of people in this post.
If you are developing software, it would be really nice if you could provide time indicators when a software operation is going to take a fair amount of time. For instance, I just installed an antivirus program on my machine. One step took more than 10 minutes. I didn’t anticipate that, and it looked like the system had frozen. Just on the chance that it was a long duration step, I went and got my lunch prepared. By the time I returned, 10 minutes later, things had moved on.
It would be nice if there was some way for a user like me to tell when the program freezes versus when it is simply doing it’s thing and it’s going to take awhile.
How about running a secondary program in the background called something like “All is well” that runs a diagnostic on the installation process. Obviously if my entire system freezes, that won’t be any help. But at least it could tell if the installation program has frozen while the rest of my system is OK.
I, for one, would find that very useful indeed.
- Bal
