Introduction

Let me be honest here. I have a bias when writing this article. I hate it when slow-starting applications don't provide any feedback to me during the startup process. After starting an application and waiting a few seconds without any feedback, my brain naturally starts wondering "Did I double-click that? Maybe I didn't.", or "Hmm, I wonder if something is wrong, it doesn't look like the application is starting up." Being impatient, I either re-click the startup icon or do other things that end up causing more harm than good, all because I'm not given any feedback that the application is actually in the process of starting up. To this I say "Bad developer".

You can obviously recover from this bad start by having a great application, but why skip something that's pretty easy, and gives users a warm fuzzy about your app? If you have an application that doesn't start up almost immediately, I really recommend that you show the user a splash screen to show them that the application is really starting. And better yet, provide a splash screen with a progress bar to let the user know that you're really doing something.

So, with those thoughts in mind, let's start creating a splash screen that can be used/reused in your Java applications.