Tweet: "Did you know that the spinner seen in modern Windows boot screens is stored as a font?"
I googled for a different non-tweet source but the results were shit.
I googled for a different non-tweet source but the results were shit.
That's pretty cool actually, though that might be a bit limiting if they ever want to change it to be more complex. There is a program called Plymouth that is most seen in free operating systems like Fedora and Ubuntu to display animated boot splashes. If you have plymouth installed in your Linux system, you can navigate to /usr/share/plymouth/ to see that the animation is a sequence of png images that are displayed at boot using kernel mode settings (KMS) and direct rendering manager (DRM). Pretty neat.
needs to be simple code-wise so it can be displayed in a really limited boot environment. Fonts are complex but they already have to display text so.
makes sense. if your preboot environment can already render text, it's an easy way to achieve animation.
I fucking knew the little line got longer! I just thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, now I can rest easy.
It’s actually not uncommon for icons (and occasionally animations) to be loaded as fonts. This is why if you force your web browser to only display a certain font and go to certain websites they display strangely, or just have slightly broken loading screens.
On the web this is (mainly) for optimization. If a website has a few icons there is no problem with loading a few SVGs, or (if there is a very small number) raster images can get a pass. Although, if you’re building an application with a large number of icons (think most hyper-interactive data-driven sites) for every SVG you load that is (unless embedded directly in HTML) a single HTTP request, computers (generally, in most cases) take longer to complete several smaller operations than one big one — these means that compiling your icons into a font is much more optimized than loading them individually.
Now, considering this is Windows (where they don’t particularly seem to care about heavy optimizations and fine tuning) I’m sure it was just easier for them to write a single thing that renders a font instead of something that renders a font and another thing that renders images/animations.