Open any data type. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. More and more correlations pop in as you wait. Wait. Wait. Is it done now? No, there one more popped in and two disappeared. Wait. Wait. Wait.
… there’s a lot of waiting in This & That, but no progress indicator anywhere. How do I know when it is done with an individual data type? — and globally across all data types?
Heh. The unfortunate reality is it’s never done. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of x, y, lag combinations, not to mention Granger causality calculations.
In very early versions of the app I did have a progress bar. But all it did was disappoint and distract. Instead what I settled on was having it reorder the tasks list so that the things you’re looking at in that moment are top of the queue, getting done first.
In a typical app session, if you open a bunch of data type list views, it’s going to stack up so much work that it’s extremely unlikely to get all of those calculations updated before you leave the app again. So the best the app can promise is to be working on the calculations that are most relevant to what you’re looking at at the time.
My mental mode I’ve settled into is to just start browsing the lists and correlations and not think about it. As I pause on each list view to assess, it’ll be filling in those correlations. And when I go into a specific correlation view it’ll be filling in all the lags for that correlation (assuming they haven’t already finished). Then it’ll keep working on the correlations from the preceding list view, so when I go back to that those will be more up to date too.
Not so coincidentally: this is also what Apple’s Health app does. Though I find their algorithm a bit more frustrating - it likes to clear the UI completely if it doesn’t have up to date data, thus often leaving it unusable until it starts filling in with updated summaries etc. But yeah, basically This & That is copying Apple’s UX there - no progress bar, because it ultimately just distracts and disappoints. And prioritise updating first the things the user is currently looking at.