--no-splash should be a checkbox in the Preferences dialogue

[zapyon@…]

Hi.

I have nothing agaist the design of the splash screen. It's neat. But splash screens annoy me in general: they hover on top of the window you want to work in just to show that, yes, the program whose symbol you just clicked, does indeed start up. And I have found that often the splash screens slow down start-up. With muCommander my impression is that start-up is almost twice as fast without splash, even on a dual-core AMD (2 GHz) with 2 Gigs of RAM. Now, I found the forum post that told me to add the --no-splash as a start-up parameter. On Linux, you have to be root to do that (considering muCommander has been installed systemwide by root; the startup script is in /usr/share/mucommander/). Hmmm.
Also, for Windows, I will have to check on Monday and edit the respective setting. Not really userfriendly towards the average GUI user. If possible, it would be great if you could add a "[ ] show splash screen at start-up" checkbox somewhere in the Preferences dialogue (by the way: German translation may be: "[ ] zeige Startbild" -- even better (and simpler) would be a check box ON the start-up screen "[ ] don't show this again" ...

Best regards

Andreas

[sclebo05@…]

Splash Screen as Option

[sclebo05@…]

also, will need a javadoc entry for show_splash_screen , or whatever we name that variable.

[maxence@…]

Josh: thanks a lot for the fix, very much appreciated! Just integrated it with a couple modifications:
- removed the --splash --no-splash command line options as they conflicted with the new preference
- moved the splash screen checkbox to the top of the 'Misc' preference tab, next to 'Check for updates on startup'

Andreas: thanks for the detailed report. I ran some benchmarks under OS X to try and measure the impact of the splash screen on startup times and could not find any noticeable performance impact:

w/ splash screen :
3826
3882
3317
3643

w/o splash screen :
3607
3547
3392
3365

Startup times are in milliseconds and were collected on a Core 2 Duo @2Ghz 4GB RAM running Java 1.6 on Mac OS X Leopard.
Things might be different under different OSes / configurations though.

The change will be in tomorrow's nightly build.

Cheers,
Maxence