UIAlertView starts to show, screen dims, but it doesn't pop up until it's too late!

Question

I have a button which when pressed makes calls that load information from a series of URLs (about 5 seconds loading time). Right before actually making those calls I want to add

Answer 1

If you have a bunch of operations to perform, in addition to performSelectorInBackground: like cescofry wrote, you can use NSOperation and NSOperationQueue.