Do you have any Ajax loading image ideas for use with jQuery?

Question

I have a page being loaded with jQuery. The initial load includes 100 records with 6 icons per record. Needless to say, it takes a few seconds to load and I want to give the user a "loading" prompt/animation.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

http://www.ajaxload.info/ is a great resource for generating animated GIFs for this sort of thing.

Once you've got your animation, render it as part of the page; fire the jQuery load mechanism on the animation's onload() event (so you're certain the animation has loaded first), and use a callback at the end of your loading sequence to disable/hide the animated GIF.