An idea for a better loading screen
 

Ran across this picture while wandering around today and it gave me a great idea for a future change to Maemo and maybe even Mer at some point. The idea here is simple. Instead of having the generic two image screens, plus the progress bar, why not just have something simple like this (obviously animated and not static as shown in the picture) showing the load progress instead? I for one would go for something like that. Another alternative might be something similar to the KDE load screen seen in KDE 3.x. Either one would be an improvement on the current loading screens.

Just my 2c. Spend as you see fit. ;)

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

That's awesome! :D

I messed around with it a little bit. It wasn't my best work to be honest, just a little tweak because of boredom. I just basically added:
1) Maemo.org Logo & reflection.
2) Changed colors to maemo-ish orange. (I wanted to keep the original font, but I didn't know how to change the color when it was part of the picture. I just ended up trying to approximate it with a different font.)
3) "Status indicator" to let those who want to know the stuff happening in the background.

Let me know what you think (and have fun tweaking; the .psd file can be found here). Also, I can't code any of this stuff (like adding the status information, which may not be possible), so I would appreciate if someone that actually knows how the code would work could take a look at it.

I hope more mockups are made in these forums (and eventually translated into actual code)!

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

Dude, I like that. :D Yeah, we'd need a real photoshop god to make it look professional, but your mockup is excellent! That'd be an even better way to do the loading screen! My only change would be to remove the ugly orange (it's nothing against you, but I hate the orange color used with the new maemo.org design) and replace it with a soft blue, which I think looks light years better.

On a side note, if someone were to integrate a progress meter like this, we'd need something that would allow for being able to change the images should someone want something else, similar to how the boot images can be changed now for the tablets. I really don't want to demand too much of the developers on this, but I do think that would count towards a hopefully short list of "must have" items. ^_^;;

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

heh...I guess I'm just so used to the orange (from Ubuntu), but the cool thing about photoshop is that changing colors, etc. takes only minutes. :D

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

Nice work. I like it. I'd like to see the fonts be something more...Helvetica ( :p )...but cool.

Tim

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

i like the idea to got a animated startup picture instead static one

that's be the must if we can get animation gif or others animations for stratup and why not desktop animated background image too.

woot

Re: An idea for a better loading screen
 

Well, if we stuck with the 2 picture setup for now, which I would prefer not given the suggestions above, and could get animated gifs working, then it would be best to simply have a rotating recycle image (3 arrows flowing in a circle) for the animated gif with the word "loading" at the bottom doing some kind of left to right ripple. Otherwise I think the multi-part loading screen I mentioned above would be better. Then that way we can track progress as it's loading, and be able to guess what died if it ever fails to completely load.