[gtsop]

I have only implemented progressbars on the web.

After various progressbars on different projects my approach is this:

- Have an array of tasks

- Have a % progressbar

- Each task adds (100/total_tasks)% once completed regardless of how fast it is

Now comes the fun part. There is this single task that takes up the majority of the time amd your progressbar is stuck at 56% percent for too much time compared to the other tasks. You don't have feedback as a user. Is it stuck? Is it still going on?

Now is the time to optimize for use experience!

Why is this task taking so long? Are you loading a huge asset? Break it up, compress it, optimoze it. Are you doing something CPU intensive? Break up your computation over distinct tasks.

This attitude has led me to implement better technological solutions as well as user experiences

[allenu]

Good on you. Most progress bars are about user experience and not so much about accuracy. People just want to know that there's a long sequence of work and that progress is being made.

It's often an illusion and showing too much how the sausage is made makes the user start asking questions about what's happening behind the scenes.

That said, a long task that is prone to failure due to external factors should definitely be conveyed in the progress bar. If a bad network connection is affecting a process from finishing, you obviously want the user to know that so they don't blame the software for being slow. :)