We have all seen the majority of different ways of displaying feedback to users via Ajax calls, however one I hadn’t seen before caught my eye today. Instead of hijacking the entire screen, or creating new sections or areas on the screen and causing movement, this does a modal dialog type effect… just without the dialog part.

You can see some examples here and here. This is certainly a nicer and softer way of displaying progress as no extra space is used up with the effect. Better still, this has a Ruby on Rails helper already made!