There’s a useful UI element in iOS that displays status information in a semi-transparent popup. It’s great for transient activities, for which the popup only needs to stay up for a second or less. Just enough for the user to see what’s happening, without needing to do anything to dismiss the popup.
What it’s not so great for is situations where the activity can take a long time to complete. For example, in the official Twitter app, saving a link to ReadItLater or InstaPaper displays a “Saving URL…” message.
The problem here is that depending on the speed of the network connection and the responsiveness of the server, this message can remain displayed for many seconds. Or indeed many many seconds, i.e. a minute. It can make reading anything else very difficult until the message goes away.
It’s even worse if you try to save another link while the first message is still displayed. Now the two semi-transparent popups are added together, making a more opaque popup.
This is even harder to see through!
Please, only use this element if the message is truly transient – and quickly transient.
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