Twitterrific has a splash screen and I would like to get rid of it. But I can’t.
Splash screens hurt the user experience from a purely psychological point-of-view. They don’t change the launch time of your iPhone application at all, but it looks and feels longer.
But there’s a problem: you can only specify one Default.png file to be displayed at launch time. Unfortunately, applications can have many visual states which you’d like to show as the code is loaded. In the case of Twitterrific, the list or detail view can be active and they have no visual commonality.
So what are the current options?
Some people have suggested that you have a single startup image (like the list view in Twitterrific) and use a Core Animation transition to the actual state the user was last in. This would work, of course, but it has a major flaw: it increases the amount of time needed before the user can actually start using the application (they need to wait for the transition to finish.)
Another option would be to show a blank screen. I tried this, and my first thought was that the application had crashed. Not acceptable.
Why not replace the Default.png on-the-fly? As Tom Insam notes, you can’t modify the application bundle: doing so breaks the application signing and will leave you with code that won’t run.
So that leaves us with splash screens. The user knows the launch is in progress, there are no jarring visual changes, and it’s the quickest way to get to an active state.
Of course, there are mechanisms to have multiple startup screens. You can see it in the Clocks app: the world clocks view has a different startup image than the stopwatch view. Another example are the new chrome-less Safari pages that you can put on the home screen: these apps take a snapshot of the current screen at exit and display it at the next launch.
Apple should expose this functionality to third parties. If you agree, please submit a duplicate for Radar ID# 5872097. Until that happens, please excuse our splash screen.