Splash screen in standalone - too long to show

[Richard Gaskin]

John Rule wrote:

 > I am finding that the fastest I can get my splash screen to show
 > is about 8 seconds...that seems a little long compared to any
 > 'real' app.

Unless it's made by Adobe or Macromedia, where the launch times will 
commonly run between 30 and 60 seconds. ;)

 > I know the RunRev engine has to load, and do it's internal stuff,
 > but this is just on the border of being annoying to the user (me)
 > in my opionion.

I'm a big fan of snappy launch times.  Made myself somewhat unpopular on 
a Big Corporate Software Vendor list by raising the issue there, asking 
if maybe it was time for some optimization (note to self: never mention 
optimization to engineers forced to succumb to a marketing VP's 
unbridled lust for featuritis).  Seems it's kind of a sore spot with 
developers stuck using bloated frameworks (ah, the special hell that is 
developing in a Big Corporate environment; not everyone has it as good 
as we Rev developers. :)

 > Are there any tricks to getting a stack to display right away in a
 > standalone? Maybe an option in the RunRev engine to do this?

A small raw stack (no initialization scripts of any kind) turned into a 
standalone opens in well under half a second on my modest 1GHz 
single-processor Mac (PB 4G; Dock set to not animate launches; 768MB 
RAM).  So the engine load time itself seems pretty darn quick.

Things that can affect launch time include:

- The size of the standalone stack: objects need to be read from
   disk and unpacked in memory, so bigger stacks will take longer.

- Other people's initialization:  Are you using any Rev libraries?
   If not, does removing them from the build process result in a
   faster launch?

- Your own initialization:  What does your app do before the line
   that shows the splash screen?


-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev