progress slider for loading a clip should show up.

Use head on http requests. This only applies for http. If it were another protocol, sol. telnet 198.116.65.118 80 HEAD /IMAGES/MEDIUM/GPN-2000-000058.jpg HTTP/1.1 Host: grin.hq.nasa.gov

Also, probably want to make a "progress" utility and have UI widgets, the applet content pane / Windowed UI register awareness. Slap a glasspane over stuff and make something appear that's translucent, captures events and has a nifty progress bar, one with a % completion for http and an indication of how much has been downloaded otherwise.

There's also stuff to do downloads like this for you, things that track progress and download it at an appropriate speed. Using this, we can hook it up to our own progress thing as well as something to pay attention for the log messages, which are currently done manually.

A download manager thingy that looks like it's much more clever than mine is here: http://code.techinterviews.com/download-manager-in-java/56

Here is another: http://www.notes411.com/dominosource/tips.nsf/0/480C4E3BE825F69D802571BC007D5AC9!opendocument