27 Mar 2004 | mattymcg said...

Without wanting to stir up a storm as I am far from a diehard Microsoft man, but isn't this a feature that Windows has offered for quite a while...?

27 Mar 2004 | Jim said...

Sorry but in almost every windows application I have that choice, especially during install. You can easily cancel at anytime. By the way I just realized that mattymcg also made a similar comment which I wasn't even aware of. I just found it amusingly interesting that you found such a feature unique enough to post about it. As far as I remember almost all windows apps (serious ones of course) offer that feature.

28 Mar 2004 | David Heinemeier Hansson said...

There's two aspects that differentiates what Apple is doing. First of all there's a timer that actually has some relation to reality. I've sat through numerous installation progress indicators that either stayed at 20% done for most of the installation and finished the remaining 80% in 5% of the time. Or raced to 80%, then spent four times as long to complete the last twenty. The iPhoto converter was pretty close to the original prediction and progress was steady.

Secondly, and most important, is the opportunity to halt mid-process and return to finish the job later. That's certainly not a common feature in installations or conversions. That you could leave the process half-way through and return to finish the job later.

31 Mar 2004 | Allan W. said...

I would think pausing an installer halfway through, and maybe resuming it later would cause serious stability problems for operating systems: some files updated, others not, etc.

The ones I've seen that can be stopped gracefully make sure to clean up before quitting - reverting files back to their original state.

For other tasks, such as rebuilding thumbnails or something else, this feature would be great.