Animated GIF in MIAW not so animated

Question

My stage has a handler that executes a shell Ping command
which unfortunately is not asynchronous, this means the stage has
to wait for a response back from the remote computer before it can
proceed and that response could take as long as 30 seconds. I
thought it would be helpful to popup an MIAW with an animated gif
to entertain my users or at least let them know the machine is
still alive. Unfortunately, the ping handler running on the stage
is preventing the MIAW GIF from animating. I would have thought the
MIAW would be immune to loss of interactivity on the stage, anyone
know an easy work around? … Unfortunately it’s not
worth a lot of effort, a message alone is probably sufficient, but
if there’s an easy fix I’d like to try it.

Answer 1

Thanks, I was afraid that might be the case. For now
I’ll use a static wait screen. Maybe someday I’ll
revisit the code and use some combination of NetLingo to get the
same result without stalling the machine. The application is a
mobile kiosk designed to email follow up info to tradeshow visitors
in real time from the tradeshow floor. The client’s SMTP
(outgoing mail server) requires that the laptop running the kiosk
establish a VPN connection to their data center. I’m using a
shell xtra to ping their mail server during kiosk startup to make
sure the staff at the tradeshow have set everything up correctly
and to be sure I can reach the mail server before letting the kiosk
run unattended. The kiosk also pings the mail server about every 4
hours to keep the VPN connection from expiring if traffic at the
tradeshow is light. The shell xtra I’m using is a fairly
simple one and only supports synchronous execution of
commands.