Progress Bars - Computerphile

Progress bars, what are they and how do they work? Dr Valerio Giuffrida explains and goes through an implementation of a progress bar.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[afluka]

I'll never forget a story from one of my coworkers when he worked at his previous job. They had to develop a new application to replace an existing one for a client, and when doing so they greatly optimized the performance of the application. In one instance, an action that used to take 5-10 minutes now only took a few seconds. However, the users complained that the application is broken because they were used to the long-running process and thought the new application just skipped the whole thing. After a long and tedious back-an-forth trying to explain the situation, my coworker was eventually told by his superior to implement a progress bar animation with some arbitrary waiting time just to reassure the users that the work has been done.
The progress bar indicated nothing. The process would always complete before the progress bar finished. But the users stopped complaining, so that's what they went with.

[smylesg]

The worst progress bars are the ones that shoot up to 90% almost immediately and then hang around there for five minutes.

[factzilla]

0:48 The idea progress bars somehow developed from Gantt charts appears to be a wikipedia fabrication (citogenesis) - it's a random unsourced claim from an anonymous edit in 2009. Meanwhile Brad Myers' 1985 paper on "percent-done progress indicators" actually mentions "giant thermometers in charity drives [that] fill up from empty to full" as the inspiration.

[mattlarge]

Top marks for perfectly lining up the in video YT progress bar with the actual YT progress bar in the intro! 😃

[adampax]

Never thought anyone could be so enthusiastic about progress bars 😁

[Species]

Dave Plummer (Dave's Garage) did a video on this a little while ago about why the times are so unreliable. It gets tricky when the overall progress is actually many tasks which are not all equally complex.

[ej]

came thinking there was going to be some math, stayed because I love the way the presenter says "progress bar"

[prixtront]

I can't dislike this because it's educational but I think this video was all over the place and could have been better.

[xliquidflames]

Way back in the day, in the mid aughts, I was teaching myself Flash and ActionScript. I was using it to make interactive websites. Progress bars were the bane of my existence. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes the exact same code that just worked, when installed on another page, stopped working completely. It was so frustrating.

What I have always wondered about progress bars in Windows is why you see it sit at 100% for so long. In theory, you should never see a progress bar say 100%. You could see one say 99.9% but as soon as it gets to 100% it should go away because it's done. Right? So why do they sit at 100% for so long? This seems to be a Windows thing for some reason.

[CatastrophicalPencil]

Italian accents are the best at explaining the emotive content of the lesson, plus the lesson.

[lory]

Pensavo fosse un altro video di AFK, uno di quelli che mi gusto a pranzo o prima di dormire, poi ti sento parlare in inglese e dico vabbè sarà un caso o una memata, poi leggo il nome del canale e dico: "ah...". Veramente un bel video e un bell'esperimento, ti sei messo in gioco in una out of confort zone e sei andato alla grande, questa è una prova che il tuo canale personale, parlando in italiano è una grande chicca per pochi, è quasi un peccato avere una persona così acculturata tutta per noi, se parlassi in inglese e spiegassi in inglese avresti molto più seguito, ti faccio i complimenti per la lingua, nonostante si senta la cadenza italiana, la lingua è parlata perfettamente ed ho capito tranquillamente tutto, continua così

[ed_halley]

Who remembers text interface spinners? / | \ - / | \ -

[Palmit_]

"MOVING AVERAGE" - Learning that one phrase has re-defined my life understanding. It explains so much in life terms, not just mathematical or coding. Thank you @Computerfile

[TomGryn]

A well executed progress bar is a true showcase of developer brilliance

[martixy]

I literally wrote the exact same thing in HTML the other day. I just put 1 element behind the another, with inverted colors and adjust the width of the top one. Works like a charm.

[kevincozens]

The best dialog box I have seen when I was downloading multiple files was the use of two progress bars. The top progress bar was based on how many files have been transferred vs the number to be transferred. The bottom progress bar tracked how much of the file currently being transferred has been completed.

[jndominica]

An "indeterminate" progress bar is a placeholder widget for an actual bar that may appear later. It only indicates activity, not progression. You can think of a textual bar as having two overlapping graphical progress bars of 1 pixel height. If the text is monospaced, the drawing can be greatly simplified.

[nyuh]

ooh this one is fun to watch.
his enthusiasm about progress bars is infectious !!

[Allenrythe]

This is why whenever I have to make a progress bar at work I have the label update on every iteration with the number of iterations it has to do for that task and the current iteration number.

Before I started doing that I noticed lots of people would terminate a program well before it was finished because they thought it was hung.

The only difficult situation is when a single interation can take an indeterminate amount of time. In which case you need to either notify the user with a log or update the text on the progressor so they know. Ideally you try to optimize your code to avoid those situations, but it's not always possible.

[luqcrusher]

10:22 “Some people keep saying why didn’t you do the background colour first, and then only you do the style? …It’s fine.”

Spoken like a true programmer 😂😂