to accomplish this I have a [HTML]<div id="wait" class="esriSimpleSlider"> <img src="ajax-loader.gif"></div>[/HTML] that shows in the center of the screen.Then using the map.on load event (which fires when the application has finished loading) i hide it. loading = dom.byId("wait");
map.on("load", function() {
esri.hide(loading);
//other stuff
});
There are probably more elegant ways of doing this, but I hope this helps.