[mullr]

Perhaps a small progress bar embedded in the element you activated? For the first example in the video, double clicking 'lapis' would show a small progress bar embedded in the bottom of that element itself. That would indicate that it has reacted to the user action, which is what's important. You could even do a safari-type thing and make the whole element into a progress bar.

Clicking the item again while it's still processing could bring up the dialog for more detail, or to let the user cancel the operation if it's taking too long. If long running operations don't actually happen, you could do away with the progress display altogether and just use a throbber. But they probably do happen.

If your engine can deal with it, this design also affords doing operations in parallel. If not, then you could queue up commands as they're performed.

[vineet]

mullr, Thanks for the comment. We definitely want to investigate such ideas.

So far we have been mostly focusing on the 'big picture' ideas, but will be working on improving such details as we get time.