Burn Baby Burn!

Are your users complaining their new program is slow and chunky? Fancy pumping up the speed?

Often the 'subjective speed' of your application has little to do with how quickly it actually executes its code. To the user, an application that starts up rapidly, repaints quickly, and provides continuous feedback feels "snappier" than an application that just "hangs up" while it churns through its work.

And you can use a variety of techniques to give your application that "snap":

• Keep forms hidden but loaded
• Preload data
• Use timers to work in the background
• Use progress indicators
• Speed the start of your application

We'll be dealing with each of these on the next page.