Categories
Uncategorized

Beach Ball Mystery Solved

If there’s one thing that drives OS X users mad, it’s the wait cursor when an app stalls. A spinning multi-colored disc will appear whenever you mouse over a stalled/heavy processed window.
However, there’s never been any consensus as to what the official name for this cursor is. I’ve most often heard it referred to as “the beach ball”, but I’ve seen a lot of people use other random names for it.
I’m happy to report that if nothing else, Panther clears up this ambiguity that has been tearing the Apple community apart at the seams. There is an app in the Developers Tools with 7B21 entitled “Spin Control” (although the About Box also calls it “Spin Doctor”), and the About Box reads partly as follows:

Spin Control helps you track down cases where an application stops being interactive because of long computations, and causes CoreGraphics to throw up the famous Spinning Pizza of Death icon (aka Wait Cursor aka NeXT Optical Disk).

Death to the beach ball. Long live the Spinning Pizza of Death!