Loading animation while freading a large file

Hi all,

What I want to do I'm starting to believe is not really tractable without the parallel computing toolbox, but prior to giving up I thought I'd ask here.

I'm coding a gui, and at one point we do a pretty intensive fread() and then reshape(). The files are 1-3 GB so the process takes a decent amount of time and I'd like to display a little eight frame loading animation with something like:

    i=1; 
    while cancel_signal_not_received
        imshow(stack(:,:,1),'parent',myaxes;
        i=mod(i+1,8)+1;
    end

while the data loads in the background. Progress bar won't work here for obvious reasons (only two commands).

Any thoughts? I've been looking into trying to do explicit multithreading using java threads as per Yair Altman's suggestions, but I've kinda put that on the back-burner in case something a little simpler is out there.

Thanks! John