ThanosSiopoudis
commented
11 years ago This is a temporary solution as the HUD progress bar has no indeterminate option yet. I plan on adding it and making it look like the winetricks manager indeterminate progress bar
dirtyharry50
The UI problem with the progress bar in which the bar moves back and forth constantly is that it is a little confusing in the context of a GUI that does not do this as a standard thing to indicate a process is running but it is a process who's progress cannot actually be measured by the section of code in question. There is no way for Barrel or Winetricks to know the progress or even completion of the Steam installation. The best you can do there is put up something to tell the user that something is indeed happening so they are not left wondering if the process failed, crashed, never ran or whatnot.
As I recall, in the Windows world, the SDK provided helpful documentation on user interface conventions. I assume such documentation exists for OS X developers. It would be good to get a hold if this if you don't already have it and consult it whenever the unusual UI situation arises. I don't know if there is an established standard method put forth by Apple for the case where a process who's actual progress cannot be known is running but you want to let the end user know it is in fact running and that all is at least presumably well.
The best thing to do in this situation in my opinion (unless Apple has a published standard to follow) is put up a message box with a generic indicator of progress: a serious of dots or even some other graphic element as desired "for looks" that displays one element or dot at a time in a sequence, is then cleared after drawing x number of "dots" and then repeats itself indefinitely until the running task completes and the messagebox can then be terminated.
The problem I have with the "dancing bar" is that it looks like a standard progress bar but it does not behave like one and is therefore a potential source of confusion to end users which defeats its purpose to inform them that all is well.