Today’s pet peeve is programs that scan your computer for one purpose or another – like your antivirus program or a disk utility program. Very few of them tell you how long it’s going to take and that is what peeves me.
I’m left sitting here wondering how long it’s going to take. Is it going to be 2 minutes or 20 minutes? Do I have time to start (or finish) something else while I’m waiting? As our disk drives are getting larger (and fuller), scans are taking longer and longer. Even those useless progress bars are better than nothing, but still useless. They take forever to finish less than halfway, then you blink and it’s at 100%.
It must be a fairly simple mathematical equation. Since it should know approximately how long it takes to scan 100 MB for example, it should be able to see the size of the drive and estimate a time for completion.
And while we all hate generic messaging (causing us to just go glassy-eyed and click OK without reading), why not make messages more relevant? Here’s some ideas:
Now might be a good time to get a coffee.
Do you have a dog? Now might be a good time for a walk.
No dog? Are you sure you don’t need a shower?
Morning: See you when you get home from work.
Evening: Have you heard how important 8 hours of sleep is?
There! I’ve shared my idea with the universe, so in the words of Jean Luc Picard,
“Make it so!”
Care to comment on what you just read?