New Professions Skill Explorer Loader?

Thanks to everyone here, and the users on other forums, I managed to get a total of 91 downloads since the release of the tool.


Of course, not all the feedback I recieved was positive, and like most other people, I tried my best to cater to the majority.

Strangely enough though, it's come to my attention that most of the new feedback i'm recieving is about the loader, and not the tool itself.

The feedback can be summarized into three main points:

The loader is slow. It looks ugly. Why do you need a loader?

To address the aesthetic issue, I honestly can't think of another UI to use for it. Feel free to suggest one.
Why does it need a loader? To help protect the code.

Then there's the speed issue. I never thought it'd be a problem, but with over 20 PM's combined from three forums, there's obviously something wrong.

I ran a test myself to see for myself:

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Result: Roughly 30 seconds.

Why did it take as long as it did? Because it ran CRC checks. It was fancy and seemed amazing when I was designing it, but seriously, what were the chances that the file downloaded would be corrupt?

So I modified it to remove the CRC and only do a simple download:

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Result: Roughly 15 seconds.

Seems amazing? Well, it acutally isn't that simple. Obfuscation never acutally protects the code, and, well, i'm paranoid. So to make a compromise between security and functionality, this happens when it fails:

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In the event of a catastrophic failure..

I spent hours getting it to work, so hopefully the above never happens.

Anyways, would you prefer the new loader, or the old loader?

 To recap

Old

Result: Roughly 30 seconds.

New

Result: Roughly 15 seconds.

And yes, they both look almost the same, but it's the functionality that matters, isn't it?

Please remember to vote on the poll.

September 6th 2011

A new loader has been designed and released, optimized to decrease loading times and hopefully still be stable while still aesthetically nice.

http://localhostr.com/download/67XXvWt/