Splash screen after loading/closing delay to indicate it's loading

[Falcon4]

This was only ever mentioned in one very old topic, but no yay/nay was ever made of it. In many different situations, uTorrent will appear to the user to not be loading or exiting, as no status is shown outside of the GUI. So from a UI-design perspective, there's a bit of a hole here that could use a simple fix

In these situations:

- lots of torrents to load (my server has 258 loaded right now), uTorrent checks the location of every file in every torrent to make sure it exists.

- a network share for a loaded torrent is offline, making uTorrent hang until the network request times out.

- network access problems or unresponsive peers/trackers, or even network filtering, causes uTorrent to hang on exit until it can notify all trackers that the peer is offline. Which it often can't.

... then uTorrent appears unresponsive/"ghosted" to the user, making them wonder WTF is going on. Personally, I always end up having to open Task Manager to see if uTorrent is really opening or exiting, and when it has/did. This could be easily and cleanly resolved with either a splash screen (Nice!) or a small, simple popup status window (like 300x150px) that indicates that uTorrent is performing some startup/shutdown function like loading files or notifying trackers (acceptable).

Just a thought

edit: Little conversation I had with a friend after writing this

Falcon4: one sec, writing a post

Falcon4: can't type two at once, lol

Falcon4: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=570176

Shane: I like that. If I were a dev, I'd take that advice.

Falcon4: yeah, hopefully the uT devs think the same

Shane: Well if they're smart they are;

Shane: oh oh oh! it should be animated.

Falcon4: like office, that would be sexy

Shane: Yes! just like Office '10.

Falcon4: probably take too much space though, that's why i figure a 300x150px window would probably be more appropriate. i should make a mock-up or something

Shane: well, what about this, a small splash screen just above the task tray

Shane: all animated and stuff, so it's still pretty.

Falcon4: lol, i dunno 'bout all that. it'd have to be procedurally animated if anything. because this splash screen would have to occupy a proportional amount of space in the program to its purpose, so for a screen that basically says "i'm loading therefore i'm not actually being productive yet", or "i'm closing, so i'm just getting in the way", it should occupy a VERY small amount of space

Shane: =0

Shane: what about a window in the same style as an old-school msn notification =D

Falcon4: hmm, that's not half bad

Shane: as for prettyness, that'd be covered by it just having a scrolling motion and okay background.

Falcon4: pretty much, slide into view and slide out when it's completed

Falcon4: but of course, well, then there's another problem

Shane: oh?

Falcon4: being a notification in that style, it would have to be always-on-top in order to function

Falcon4: and that means it couldn't be "gtfo my way" with a mouse click

Shane: Well that's okay, little close button?

Falcon4: if it was just a simple dialog window, it would have a taskbar icon to indicate it's still there, but could be clicked out of the way

Shane: hm, that'd make sense.

Falcon4: yeah, if you close it, its purpose also goes away. but that could be an acceptable compromise... if people don't want the dialog to begin with