Cheating Or Good Design?

A comment on Reddit (by raygundan) points out an interesting technique Apple uses on their iOS platform:

when you switch apps, the device saves a screenshot of what the last screen looks like for that app so that when you switch back again, that saved screenshot is the first thing you see. This is done to buy time for the app to fully load. Instead of showing you a blank screen or a loading screen, the device shows you a screenshot of the app. This technique works because the time it takes to load the rest of the app isn’t very long anyway, so a second of showing a screenshot that the user cannot interact with doesn’t cause confusion. What it does do is make it looks as if the app has loaded instantly, which results in a very good experience for the user.

I think this is a brilliant idea. It seems we live in a world full of loading gifs and I appreciate fine details like this. The fine details that you don’t see is the difference between mediocre and extraordinary.