DumbDialog 1.0 (20kb) is a small, faceless Cocoa application that does nothing but display a panel containing a progress bar and a text field. It does not have a menu bar or dock icon. It is intended for use by AppleScript programs that need to display an Aqua-looking progress bar. It was developed and tested on Tiger (10.4). It may work on older versions of OSX, but I don't know. Email me if you have any success on 10.3.

DumbDialog has three properties of interest:

• paneltitle (text)
• displaytext (text)
• panelvisible (boolean)

You probably want to "activate" it early and leave it running, sending it different text to display and showing/hiding it as needed. This will make it pop open faster than restarting it and quitting it every time you want to show it.

Example usage:

tell application "DumbDialog"
  activate
  set paneltitle to "This is the progress panel title"
  set displaytext to "Hello, world!"
  set panelvisible to true
  --set panelvisible to false
   --quit
end tell

You can put the panel through as many "panelvisible=true","panelvisible="false" cycles as needed before finally quitting it altogether.