Talk:Spinning wait cursor

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Contents 1 Redirects 2 Heritage 3 Nomenclature 4 Spinning wait cursor 5 Waiting 6 Unsources facts 7 Requested move 8 Fair use rationale for Image:Spin Control.png

[edit] Redirects

Shouldn't most of the casual names redirect to this article? I had to search google for the real name before I found the wikipedia article. certainly "beach ball of death" at least should redirect here, or turn up this article in a search. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.61.66.179 (talk) 05:29, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Heritage

The spinning wait cursor of OS X has a long heritage extending back to the first NeXT computers in 1988. The history section should be changed to reflect this fact.

I think that the spinning beachball to which this article refers started with OS X whereas OS 9 had something more like a spinning gear didn't it? hydnjo talk 19:03, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The spinning, rainbow-colored beachball came to the Macintosh world with OS X, yes. Actually, it came earlier with Rhapsody. However, the very same cursor was first seen on the NeXT computers, from whose NEXTSTEP (and later OpenStep) operating system Rhapsody and OS X were derived.

The NEXTSTEP/OpenStep beachball and the OS X 10.0-10.1 beachball look identical. In 10.2 (or was it 10.3) it was aquafied and now resembles a lollipop. The earlier cursor, though, actually bears a strong resemblance to some of the icons NEXTSTEP used for representing hard disk platters or CD-ROMs. By this interpretation the icon is actually a spinning disk, which makes sense for an application that is taking a lot of time.

The first NeXT computers had four-intensity grayscale displays. On these systems the beach ball varies from dark to light and perhaps resembles a spinning LP more than anything else.

As for OS 9: On these systems, like all classic MacOS systems, the default wait cursor was a watch. Depending on the application, sometimes the watch's minute hand would turn. Some applications also had a black and white beachball-like wait cursor: imagine a circle with a + inside, and two opposite quadrants of the + black. This cursor would turn. Nevertheless, this was not the standard wait cursor.

Actually, Mac OS didn't really have a "standard" animated cursor through most of its life. There were three included sets of resources: the waving hand (which was rarely used), the spinning disc, and the watch. I think the difference between the watch is that the watch indicated an operation that could not be interrupted, whereas the disc indicated that you could move windows, click Stop buttons, access menus (which would probably be completedly disabled), switch applications, etc. However, like a lot of other things, this was up to the application. I've added your note about NEXTSTEP origins, though. --Steven Fisher 06:32, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nomenclature

Why were my changes reverted by Hydnjo with the useful summary of "Don't think so". This cursor is sometimes referred to as the Catherine Wheel (it even says so on the disambig page), and applications that are unresponsive and displaying the cursor are said to be "beachballing". Did you decide to revert because you are unfamiliar with it? Mainstreetmark 15:38, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Because I could find no reference to the "spinning beach ball" being referred to as a Catherine Wheel, a band hailing from Great Yarmouth, England nor to your hidden redirect to the Breaking wheel (torture device) article (which I notice you didn't replicate with your complaint on this page). Please cite your source. Thanks, --hydnjo talk 19:11, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Copying this from my talk page- Hey- that article used to be called "Spinning Pizza of Death" or something, and when I looked on mac forums, I found a lack of consistency with the naming. "Spinning Wait Cursor" is what the APPLE HIG calls it, so that's how I came up with the name. There were quite a few forums that refered to it as the Catherine wheel, but unfortunately, Wikipedia's clone army and high pagerank is making it hard for me to find the original cites. Here is one from macforums (search for "catherine wheel"), but I can't find anything more official than that. --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 22:51, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, the link should have been to the disambiguation page Catherine wheel (with the lowercase wheel, not Catherine Wheel, as I typo'd earlier), and you can see that others have also logically referred to this spinning ball as a torture device (the Catherine wheel aka breaking wheel). There's one source. What makes "Spinning Beach Ball of Death" (which i've never heard of) any more significant than "the Catherine wheel" (which you've never heard of)? Both are nicknames. Both have been used. People do say that applications "are beachballing". I'm not sure i'm comfortable with you dropping changes because you're unfamiliar with them. Mainstreetmark 23:02, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

copy of my response to Mainstreetmark:

Sorry 'bout that. I have rv'd my hasty rv. Just being defensive I guess (being a Mac user). Good catch. I just have taken out the piped link which seems a bit extreme (to Breaking wheel). Put it back in if you feel strongly about it and we can discuss it further. Whoa, livin' on a boat - cool! --hydnjo talk 03:18, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

This should be removed. It's not a notable term, and adds nothing to the article. However, it does make the article look very unprofessional. --Steven Fisher 18:17, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree, done. And define that it is the Catherine wheel (firework) that is being referenced. --hydnjo talk 19:50, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Just so I understand, if I go to a forum and make a posting refering to the spinning wait cursor as "duh spinnee fing" or "Bernard" I can expect that to be added as an alternate name under Nomenclature? Right? AlistairMcMillan 20:42, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

No, of course not. One problem is the listing on the Catherine wheel disambig page. Perhaps that reference should be deleted to avoid the temptation to add it here. --hydnjo talk 21:14, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. AlistairMcMillan 21:19, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Why was "Spinning Pizza of Death" removed from this article? The term gets almost half a million google hits on this topic, and is in the Jargon file under that name. --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 16:04, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay. But can we please limit it to "pizza of death" and "beach ball of death" and not include all the other forum crap. Extra points if someone can actually come up with a screenshot of the old "pizza of death" version and add it to the page. AlistairMcMillan 22:47, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Spinning wait cursor

Does anybody know how to make Image:Waitcursor.gif actually spin as in real life? That would be excellent, although it would probably be a .gif file rather than an ordinary .jpg file. Feel free to replace the .jpg .gif with an animated .gif if you know how. The link(s) from here would be much better. Thanks, hydnjo talk 02:14, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

I made a 300% scale animated GIF and added to a section. Feel free to move it to a more appropriate paragraph.--Angelday 08:11, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I've boosted this to the top of the article and removed the strip of 100% frames. Thanks. Chris Cunningham 10:40, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Waiting

"The advantage of the wait cursor is that instead of telling you "Macintosh will terminate this program" like Windows does (or did), you are given the option to wait."

This isn't entirely true, Windows gives you the option of waiting as well. - Evil saltine 00:31, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Unsources facts

I added two or three {{fact}} tags. I find the claim that excessive beachballing is a sign of a failing HD particularly in need of citation. I would also genuinely like to know whether this is true or not; if you find out, it'd be a wonderful favor if you left a note on my talk page. Finally, there are some others facts that, although unsourced, seem obvious or like common knowledge among Mac users. So I don't know whether to add the {{fact}} tag to them or not. Thanks much! David McCabe 06:03, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Greetings! I added the note about the failing hard drives. I couldn't find a citation just now, mostly because Apple's developer search engine is just awful. The logic is simple, though: The spinning wait cursor appears whenever an application stops responding to events. Applications do not (can not, even) respond to events while the system is performing virtual memory paging. Thus, if paging takes an unusually long amount of time the spinning wait cursor will appear. Meanwhile, the hard drive itself and the operating system both attempt to correct for a failing hard drive by retrying the operation. The system will attempt to page other applications back in, resulting in multiple applications showing the spinner. Believe me, it happens; I've had it happen to an old iMac G3, a 12" PowerBook G4 (twice; the replacement drive only lasted a year), and a G3 Cube. But citations are definitely good, so I'll try to find some for these points over the next few days. It shouldn't be too hard, but it is likely to be frustrating because of Apple's developer documentation search engine. -- Steven Fisher 06:11, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Steven; thanks for your prompt reply, and for trying to find a citation. I feel your pain with the developers' site. As it happens, I am trying to find the problem with a G3 iMac that is spinning out all the time. I realize that WP is not a Mac help forum, but do you know how to see the IO errors that would be happening if this hypothesis is correct in my case? I don't see any in Console.app, and Google avails me not. Thanks again. David McCabe 06:24, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

David, a hard drive's firmware usually retries a significant number of times before giving up and reporting back an error. It is pretty common for a noticeable disk slowdown to be felt far before any errors start showing up at the OS level. I would be concerned if the system is showing unusual sluggishness. 18.96.6.46 05:58, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested move

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Spin Control.png

Image:Spin Control.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 16:58, 29 November 2007 (UTC)