I noticed this when importing from bootstrap.dat: the progress bar is at about 50% for a very long time, and there is no indication whatsoever of when verification/importing of bootstrap.dat will complete. It would be much more helpful if there was an estimate of how many hours and minutes it will be until verification is complete, and a progress bar that gradually moves forward.
I am using v0.8.5-beta on OS X Mavericks.
I don't think this is really possible. You are downloading that data from multiple peers, all with different varying connections and speeds. Block syncs should be less painful after the headers first implementation.
If you want to speed up the process you could download a torrent of the bootstrap.dat file to get you most of the way.
A lot of work already went into making the progress bar more accurate. This has extremely low priority. I'd rather have that people spend that time on making the sync process quicker and more reliable.
But sure, if you like to do this, pull requests welcome.
I just wanted to say... nooo, not again :D. The first 50% are quicker, because the blocks were smaller AFAIK, which reflects what you see.
The progress bar already tries to compensate for that. It is based on estimated number of total transactions, and even uses a higher weight for transactions after the last checkpoint, as signature checking is enabled after that point.
The problem is that during the progression, the relative impact of network, RAM, PCU and disk change. Depending on whether your system is faster or slower for these separate aspects, the estimation will change.
Feel free to be even more clever, but I doubt you can make it perfect for everyone...