New room list: Don't show message preview spam during startup

[turt2live]

Because the app decrypts all the history ever on startup, the message previews often scroll by quickly. We could hide it behind a loading bar of some sort, or somehow improve the app's approach to initial decryption

[niquewoodhouse]

Here are a few quick options.

I think the full lines are probably best, everything else could be misconstrued as typing or become noisy, and the line is probably most expected by a user to mean "here be something, soon"

Do we have options to animate the line (eg gif/CSS)? What's the best way from a performance POV as it will be appearing X times at once?

[turt2live]

Animating with CSS transitions (or CSS animations, but might be overkill) should be fine. We need to figure out how to represent this in the underlying app first though.

[niquewoodhouse]

Light & dark theme (links for reference).

When it comes to figuring this out and we need an animation or any edits, please feel free to send back.

[nadonomy]

(For posterity— writing up some slightly belated notes from a design critique we had last week).

When reviewing this, we noted that:

• We think the 'abstract' fill approach is a good way to warm up the eye
• We think animating a mask/gradient flashing through (like 'slide to unlock' of old) would feel great, with a large 'rest time' between flashes
• To avoid the entire screen dancing, all animations would need to be in sync
• Need to R&D more, but we're assuming there's a performant way to implement this working with the fastest parts of CSS animations