Conclusion

For graphical applications that take time to start up, a splash screen provides a professional touch to your application, and more importantly, provides feedback to the user during the startup process. This makes for happy users. On top of that, a splash screen with an active progress bar, as shown in this article, provides even more feedback to your users. This is useful not only for typical application startup, but can even help you for times when you need to debug the application startup process.