How to indicate that an element in a grid is the current one

Question

I'm working on a real-time web application that has a grid displaying a a list of elements that can change continuously.

Currently, I'm just displaying a checkbox "Is latest" for development purposes, but I'm wondering what would be a good way to indicate that the row is the current or "latest" one. By latest I mean that it should indicate that an operation is in progress. This is reported via an external real-time source, and the grid is not clickable.

Finally, I should mention that only one row in the list can have this status at any given time and that sorting it is not 'enough'. A second visual indicator should be added.

Here's a snip from how it looks (Note that the last row has a checked value)

Answer 1

If it's a long process that keeps being done, then as Stephen suggests, a background change is fine.

If there are tons of processes per minute, and a user needs to see which one is running at each moment, it could be a good idea to have a highlight effect (like jQuery's) on play. You can leave the background changed afterwards, yet giving it a little more awareness on change.

If the tasks that are not currently being run are not important, you could also gray them out a little, instead of emphasising one.

Another thing that comes to my mind is that you could still add a header like zone that tells the current task done. Something like a news feed. See an example below (do not pay attention to the grid's contents, it's the lorem ipsum from Balsamiq mockups)

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Answer 2

What about changing the background colour of the row?

Could be done by adding a CSS class to the via JavaScript.