An important design element that’s part of the whole AJAX business is somehow letting your user know that stuff is actually happening while the server crunches away. A common way to do so, is to add a little animated GIF that is only shown when the AJAX request is happening.
37signals favor this one, which is taken more or less directly from Mac OS X, I reckon - at least stylistically. I am not sure of the copyrights on that piece of graphic, so I am reluctant to use it in my own apps. Also, occasionally you want something a bit different.
Which is why I’ve made and collected a few free (both as in beer and speech) animated GIFs and put them up here. Download and use them in whatever project you want.
If you have an activity indicator of your own and you want to share it with the world, email it to me, and I’ll get it up there.
Jakob, thanks for sharing these images. They're supposed to animate, right? I don't see them animate. For your info, I use Firefox 1.5 windows XP
They animate for me in Firefox 1.5 on both Win XP and OS X. Beats me why they don't on your own machine, sorry.
There's a configuration option in Firefox where you can tell how animated images should be handled. "about:config", it's called "image.animation_mode", default is "normal". HTH.
Thanks Jakob, great images. I had the same problem with images not animating. Realised I had the "disable image animations" in the web dev extension turned on..I turned it off and images work fine. Just in case anybody else had this problem, this might save some head scratching...;)
The icon actually comes from Firefox on the mac. It's used as the progress indicator (also known as the throbber)
Just for the record, I see the animations now. My laptop must have had trouble yesterday.
Thanks for sharing the images.
BTW, I found your entry via ajaxian.com. Can you share any stats as of how much traffic you got? Just curious...
Jesper
heggaton, are you sure it's from firefox? that looks a lot like the search indicator in max os x
Firefox on Mac definitely uses that icon. The Spotlight searching indicater looks the same, too.
One of the major complaints that users have about Ajax interfaces is that they have no idea when things are happening in the background. If some important background activity is going to be happening, something that the user needs to wait for, a deve...
Thanks a lot.
I made use of ur gif and wrote a simple tip on showing activity or loading message for AJAX at http://radio.javaranch.com/balajidl/2006/01/13/1137187379092.html
