Excessive redrawing

[Kippesoep]

I’ve been using PA for ages (in fact, tomorrow will be exactly 10 years ago since I first ordered – making it among the maybe a dozen tools I’ve stuck with for a decade) and I absolutely love it, though I figured I’d mention an issue that I find quite annoying. PowerArchiver (presently at 12.00.54, though it has done this as long as I remember) does excessive redrawing.

For example, when switching from the “home” to the “ftp” tab I see the following:

• Main file panel redraws
• FTP side panel appears
• Main file panel redraws again
• Toolbar(s) or ribbon redraw(s) to display the new tab contents
• Main file panel redraws again
• “Archive” header/title-bar appears above the main file panel
• Main file panel redraws yet again
• The window title changes

Every time it redraws, the main file panel flashes white and the cursor turns to an hourglass. The whole process takes about a full second.

In addition: as the above occurs, with the classic toolbar, I see the “Action” menu disappear, then reappear, then disappear again, then the “Tools” menu disappears, then the “FTP” menu appears. The menubar gets redrawn with every change.

The excessive redrawing is quite jarring and makes it feel sluggish, not a nimble tool. (As my PC can run Crysis smoothly, I should think it has enough horsepower to draw the PA interface). Because of this I use only the classic interface as it seems even more sluggish with the modern / ribbon interface, probably as the ribbon layout process is also quite visible.

[spwolf]

this is because each interface is created on demand, instead preloaded… for instance, my Office 2010 takes almost a second create just different tab (although it pauses instead of showing it to you like PA), let alone complete interface like Archive to FTP transition in PA. If you change from Mail to Calendar it takes longer than PA from Archive to FTP, at least here.

there is no other way to do it, if we were to do it at the start, it would cause PA to load in 10 seconds.

[Kippesoep]

I can imagine, being a programmer myself. Still, it might be possible to cache it once created so subsequent switches would be faster. And personally, I think disabling refreshes for a second would be less jarring than showing all the redraws (also would likely make it faster, not having to do the redraws in between). Win32 has LockWindowUpdate and WM_SETREDRAW for this precise reason. I realise it’s not a high priority thing, but I do think it would improve perceived quality of something that already is great.

[spwolf]

i will make sure dev team checks it out once we release official release… thank you!