iPhone App Startup Screen

Question

yet another basic question ... I have an app that takes about 4-5 secs to load.

I want to use the time and show a startup screen that

• is visible at least for 4 seconds, and
• shows until the app is loaded and ready to show

How can I build that into my app?

Answer 1

Looks like a job for Default.png

http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/defaultpng-the-secret-of-the-load-screen.html

Don't forget to be careful of your capitalization.

Answer 2

Default.png is just the starting point. That will give you a splash screen (the Apple user interface guidelines suggest that the splash screen should look like the first screen to make the app look as if its loading faster - but that's actually a bad user experience IMHO).

The splash screen disappears as soon as the first view is shown. However, if your code is still doing stuff that renders the interface unusable, it can be worthwhile to make your first view look like the splash screen, possibly adding a progress bar, then swap that out for the first real view when your app is actually ready for user input.

Answer 3

Have your application start with a view that shows the initialization progress and after the initialization is complete, replace it with your app's main view. Make sure to defer the initialization step with -performSelector:afterDelay or place the initialization code in -applicationDidFinishLaunching, so that the Default.png doesn't show up but for a very small amount of time and you can show your progress view.

Answer 4

Refer to this StackOverflow question. However, if your app takes 4-5 seconds to load, I would focus on improving its performance. Can you do some operations later, rather than at startup? Splash screens are generally a bad user experience and are discouraged in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.