Limegarden.net Personal site of Wouter Lindenhof

Splash screens

I always have my doubts about splash screens. As far as I know the majority of the splash screens have no function. A minority does have a function (they do background loading).

The main purpose of splash screen is, in my opinion, advertising. For a few second the user sees the name of the application and the company behind it. I admit that you can use it to load things in the background, but showing a splash screen also takes time. In that case you are better off loading the application and showing a progress bar. At that point the user sees it as the application is loading content. If you are using a splash screen for that (and I'm going to assume it makes no difference in performance or time that it requires) than the users perceives it as an annoyance.
This is a weird thing. Because showing a splash screen that does nothing but is only showed for a 2 seconds after which the application starts loading is seemed to be less intrusive than a splash screen that takes longer but actually causes the application to load faster (it doesn't require two useless seconds).

So how do you create a splash screen?
First of all start with a small image (take the dimensions of the office 2007 splash screens), add some abstract art (not something complex). Then create a form without borders in C# that closes after a few seconds and then modify the program.cs so that it looks like this.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace Client
{
    static class Program
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The main entry point for the application.
        /// </summary>
        [STAThread]
        static void Main()
        {
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Application.Run(new SplashScreen()); // load the splash screen
            Application.Run(new MainWindow()); // load the application
        }
    }
}

I know it's a cheap trick, but it looks nice if you do it well. And most customers care a lot about appearance.