Honesty in application design

We’re a few months into the painstakingly slow process of home video conversion and upload. Many tools have come into play, but the most useful has been VisualHub. It’s batch operation, Xgrid support, and variety of device destination presets make the fact that it is free that much more amazing.

Last night I gave it a whopper of a batch list to get crunching on. When I went to bed it had some ridiculous estimate of time to complete, several thousand hours, constantly recalculating up and down.

But when I woke, this.

I love it. Is it a lie or is it honesty? I’d much rather have an app say, “You know what, I can’t do this. I have no freaking idea how long this is going to take” than flop around trying to calculate the incalculable.