Videos and pictures of Neo FreeRunner at CES:

[David Pottage]

Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Jan 12, 2008, at 9:34 AM, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
>> Well I guess you just can't please everyone :/
>
> Sure you can - put a switch in the phone's advanced preferences!   :')
>
> Anyway, I have always felt that with a little dress-up, the verbose
> startup could become reassuring rather than alarming.   The reason
> it's alarming is mostly that it just sits there saying nothing
> intelligible to the end-user.   If it said things like "probing for
> Atheros ethernet device...   found." or "configuring network..." then
> the end user might be less alarmed.   If you don't know any better
> though I think it looks too much like a Windows crash, to which
> old-timers are too painfully accustomed.
On the non verbose startup screen, Can we have a progress bar with a
percent complete, Where certain percentage steps, have defined meanings,
so if I see a device that gets as far as 27% I can search online and
find out that it found the Atheros Ethernet, but did not get as far a
probing the GSM interface.

In my day job I spend some of my time supporting a database application,
it does not have verbose startup, but I know that 30% is when it sees
the license server, 35% for the backed database etc, which is almost as
good, once you know which steps mean what.

Obviously to be useful, the steps and their meanings should be as fixed
as possible, so we would have to leave gaps in the numbering scheme, a
bit like leaving gaps in the line numbers a program in an early dialect
of the basic language.

-- 
David Pottage