The general idea of creating overlays for actions that take awhile to complete should really be integrated into the system itself. It's a really good idea that the desktop gets around by allowing multiple windows at once. On a phone with only 1 window, it's a really obvious solution that surprisingly hasn't been used much before.
I think the origin of the idea is probably Facebook's Android app where contacts are little icons floating on your screen. That use case was so-so and only really useful if you were messaging one or two people constantly. This takes that idea a step further - but it could be taken even further by making all asynchronous actions use the system by default. Maybe in Android 5? A good first step would be to generalize this into an easy to use library that app devs can include without fuss. Maybe if I get some time next week...
I think the origin of the idea is probably Facebook's Android app where contacts are little icons floating on your screen. That use case was so-so and only really useful if you were messaging one or two people constantly. This takes that idea a step further - but it could be taken even further by making all asynchronous actions use the system by default. Maybe in Android 5? A good first step would be to generalize this into an easy to use library that app devs can include without fuss. Maybe if I get some time next week...