One of the most often noted things frustrating users not just of KDE but in all free desktops is the lack of any indication that an application is loading when you clicked a button. There is no signal to the user that the app is being loaded off disk and initializing until a window pops up. Often, if the application is large the user assumes something went wrong and just starts hitting the button multiple times - resulting in the large app being unintentionally run several times and many windows appearing (eventually ;-)

CDE, an older commercial desktop for Unix, solved this problem by putting a little blinking light in the panel. Windows uses a odd half pointer/ half hourglass cursor to indicate it's busy but you can still do stuff (at least it used to - it's been a long time since I used Windows...)

KDE developer Rik Hemsley has come up with a better solution for KDE2. As soon as you request a program be loaded it makes an entry for it in the taskbar using information derived from the executable, X-Windows itself, and the KDE desktop file if available. While the application is loading it displays a little animation to give the user visual indication that it's being loaded. Currently it's a spinning platter but that may change once the KDE artists get a crack at it. Finally, once the application is completely initialized and ready to display a window the taskbar entry changes to the window's final title (this is not known until the application shows itself, KDE does not require you know the window caption ahead of time).

This is believed to be better than both the Windows and CDE mechanism because you can see multiple applications being loaded as individual items. Using the custom cursor (Windows), or blinking light (CDE), lets you know some program is being loaded but not which and how many.

This works both with KDE and non-KDE applications running under KDE2. Here's a few screenshots of my panel loading Netscape, cropped because I happily have an insanely large monitor ;-)

Here you see Netscape being loaded (it's the second item on the bottom row). The taskbar entry appeared as soon as I selected Netscape from the KDE menu, and the little platter is now spinning as it loads.

Here you see what happened when Netscape finished loading and appeared on the screen. The animation stopped and it's taskbar entry became the final one with the proper window title.

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