I think I've watched almost every video on the intertubes about the N900 now, and one thing that I've noticed, or rather not noticed, is that there is no instant indication that an application is starting.

There seems to be a bit of a delay sometimes between clicking an app on the desktop or the app menu before anything shows up on the screen. This seems confuse people as it looks like nothing is happening and they try to start it again or do other thing when, BAM, the app takes over.

It would be nice if there was a small indicator somewhere that told the user when an app is starting… or perhaps there is, and I just haven't noticed it on the low quality YouTube videos.

In the current release, there is an instant notification (an animation and the titlebar has the name of the app in it). Also, some of the built-in apps already take advantage of a feature that allows applications to take screenshots of themselves. These screenshots will then be used as a placeholder until the application starts up. This makes the UI look really quick and responsive and the apps look as if they start up instantly.

Third party applications can take advantage of this as well by using hildon_gtk_window_take_screenshot().

See this mailing list post for a link to example code: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/021340.html

A short video that shows this effect with the "Settings" app as an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVTYQ_8GhPQ

Of course, other applications have to make use of this feature to appear instantly. It works for most built-in apps, though.

Interesting idea. I believe the iPhone does something similar. The Settings app looks like it needs a bit of tweaking though, based on that video, as the "real" screen gets redrawn quite visibly.

Usually this glitch does not happen and the transition from screenshot to the real app is seamless. The video is basically the worst case scenario when the N900 is under background load

Thanks and nice to know. Once again I learn not to trust low res videos.