Progress Indicators

Progress Indicators

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The progress indicator is a linear gauge that graphically shows the completion of a particular task, allowing you to roughly estimate the time to completion (see Figure 3-18). The annoying part is that the accuracy of progress indicators is typically not very good; the value (0 to 100 percent) displayed by an indicator is based entirely on approximations made by the application. What's worse is that some programs, especially application installers , often have several, consecutive progress indicators; unfortunately , these only display the progress of a particular task rather than the entire process, which obviously is not terribly helpful.

Figure 3-20. Often a dialog will show two progress indicators: one showing the completion of the current task and one showing the progress of the entire job