Android :: Way Of Loading Data / Notifying An Activity?

I just tried a stupid approach and it crashed my app... Basically I have an activity that has three tabs (containing three activities). Each of the tabs gets its input from an xml file downloaded off the net. Everything is fine but when I start my app, it has download the xml file and there's a "wait" time for this.I managed to get around this by adding a splash screen. It looks beautiful but the problem is when I click on the second tab, it still has to get the list off the net, so it looks ugly now... It waits before displaying the list. So what I did was design an AsyncTask that just downloads the xml file. In my main activity, I spawn two tasks initially and send the URL and Intent as parameters. And inside the activities that start inside the tabs, I use a wait(). Inside the AsyncTask, after it is done with the download, I notify the Intent using notify(). This crashed! Of course, I didn't expect it to work but just wanted to try :) Writing it so that I can either get a feedback as to why this failed or to prevent others from wasting their time on this...Now, I am sure many face the problem of a "wait" time inside the tabs. How do I solve this? I am thinking of either dimming the screen and then displaying a series of toasts or display a progress indicator inside the tabs or pre-fetching the xml files... I don't have a clue on how these can be achieved.