Progress Bars
Progress bars in software are a fine invention because they attempt to indicate approximately how long something is going to take; I can go and get (or rid myself of) a cup of coffee if I see the action will take a minute or two. As we all know, it is difficult to get progress bars to be exact; there is always a bit of give and take, and most of us realize that 100% can take a bit longer than the lovely blue stripe of the bar indicates, and I for one, have got used to that.
One very notable exception is from Content Copier in Nokia's PC-Suite.
A full 31 minutes (!) after the 100% mark was drawn on the user interface, the backup over a USB cable is completed. The first time around, I only waited 5 minutes before pressing Cancel, only to be informed in the log that the backup was aborted. The second time, I followed the progress of the backup in the Windows folder C:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\Application Data\\Nokia\\ContentCopier, watching the .nbu (Nokia Backup Utility?) file grow in size, almost byte by byte.
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