Really? You want to see that?

To say that I respect UI designers is an understatement. The lack of marriage between UI and programming is a common issue, one that hurts my eyes when it falls upon my desktop. It can be easily resolved by communication, but my goodness does it seem to be the lowest priority in most people's lists, even successful organizations.

Let's look at the windows platform, as its my base.

When a program loads, its process of loading is rarely subtle. It overtakes the screen, envelops whatever you are currently in the middle of, and sucks dry your inertia in the case of most projects. I have two noteable examples of this: Zend Development Environment and Firefox.

If one is loading, it pulls the text focus away from the other, and vice-versa. This is a critical issue when multitasking, something that I'm certain could be addressed with the "start minimized" option I know exists for shortcuts, and something I will look into, but for the start up default to be "HI, I'M THE APPLICATION YOU JUST STARTED, AND EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT LOADED FULLY, I'M GOING TO HOG THE TEXT INPUT FOCUS, HOPE THAT'S HELPFUL!" is a pain.

A simple solution for this is much the way that taskbar-based applications load. Start there, with an icon saying "I'm starting up" then when the interface is ready to be built, launch it.

Just a thought, perhaps it will become action. -------------------------------------------- 0 stated the obvious