josharian/xkcd — Issue #6: Make first load experience better
Author: josharian
Created: 2012-03-08 00:30:09+00:00
State: open

Right now, several hundred comics are downloaded one at a time, which leads to a *very* long wait while the comics roll in.

Make this experience better.

Possibilities:

* Chunk the UI updates (meh)
* Put up a spinner and lock the UI during updates (ick)
* Use github project pages to host prefetched chunks, say comics 500-600, 600-700, etc., with fallbacks to one-at-a-time (nicer, but more complicated client code, ought to remember to update it)
* Set up a one-stop "give me everything since comic X" server (nicest, but then the client isn't fully standalone-capable, which is preferable)
* ?