Unlock the full Microsoft Office experience with a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription for your phone, tablet, PC, and Mac. Microsoft 365 annual subscriptions purchased from the app will be charged to your App Store account and will automatically renew within 24 hours prior to the end of the current subscription period unless auto-renewal is. Once in a while, you may encounter the Spinning Pinwheel of Death (SPOD) on your Mac. It's that multicolored pinwheel that signifies a temporary or never-ending delay while the Mac tries to figure something out. The Mac is trying to function, but nothing is happening, so the pinwheel keeps spinning and spinning.
The spinning pinwheel is a variation of the mouse pointer arrow, used in Apple's macOS to indicate that an application is busy.[1]
Officially, the macOS Human Interface Guidelines refers to it as the spinning wait cursor,[2] but it is also known by other names, including the spinning beach ball[3], the spinning wheel of death[4], the spinning beach ball of death,[5] or the ferris wheel of death.
History[edit]
A wristwatch was the first wait cursor in early versions of the classic Mac OS. Apple's HyperCard first popularized animated cursors, including a black-and-white spinning quartered circle resembling a beach ball. The beach-ball cursor was also adopted to indicate running script code in the HyperTalk-like AppleScript. The cursors could be advanced by repeated HyperTalk invocations of 'set cursor to busy'.
Wait cursors are activated by applications performing lengthy operations. Some versions of the Apple Installer used an animated 'counting hand' cursor. Other applications provided their own theme-appropriate custom cursors, such as a revolving Yin Yang symbol, Fetch's running dog, Retrospect's spinning tape, and Pro Tools' tapping fingers. Apple provided standard interfaces for animating cursors: originally the Cursor Utilities (SpinCursor, RotateCursor)[6] and, in Mac OS 8 and later, the Appearance Manager (SetAnimatedThemeCursor).[7]
From NeXTStep to Mac OS X[edit]
NeXTStep 1.0 used a monochrome icon resembling a spinning magneto-optical disk.[a] Some NeXT computers included an optical drive which was often slower than a magnetic hard drive and so was a common reason for the wait cursor to appear.
When color support was added in NeXTStep 2.0, color versions of all icons were added. The wait cursor was updated to reflect the bright rainbow surface of these removable disks, and that icon remained even when later machines began using hard disk drives as primary storage. Contemporary CD Rom drives were even slower (at 1x, 150 kbit/s).[b]
With the arrival of Mac OS X the wait cursor was often called the 'spinning beach ball' in the press,[8] presumably by authors not knowing its NeXT history or relating it to the hypercard wait cursor.
The two-dimensional appearance was kept essentially unchanged[c] from NeXT to Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server 1.0 which otherwise had a user interface design resembling Mac OS 8/Platinum theme, and through Mac OS X 10.0/Cheetah and Mac OS X 10.1/Puma, which introduced the Aqua user interface theme.
Mac OS X 10.2/Jaguar gave the cursor a glossy rounded 'gumdrop' look in keeping with other OS X interface elements.[9]In OS X 10.10, the entire pinwheel rotates (previously only the overlaying translucent layer moved).With OS X 10.11 El Capitan the spinning wait-cursor's design was updated. It now has less shadowing and has brighter, more solid colors to better match the design of the user interface. The colors also turn with the spinning, not just the texture.
System usage[edit]
In single-tasking operating systems like the original Macintosh operating system, the wait cursor might indicate that the computer was completely unresponsive to user input, or just indicate that response may temporarily be slower than usual due to disk access. This changed in multitasking operating systems such as System Software 5, where it is usually possible to switch to another application and continue to work there. Individual applications could also choose to display the wait cursor during long operations (and these were often able to be cancelled with a keyboard command).
After the transition to Mac OS X (macOS), Apple narrowed the wait cursor meaning. The display of the wait cursor is now controlled only by the operating system, not by the application. This could indicate that the application was in an infinite loop, or just performing a lengthy operation and ignoring events. Each application has an event queue that receives events from the operating system (for example, key presses and mouse button clicks); and if an application takes longer than 2 seconds[10] https://softwarementor.mystrikingly.com/blog/how-to-get-mountain-lion-for-free. to process the events in its event queue (regardless of the cause), the operating system displays the wait cursor whenever the cursor hovers over that application's windows.
This is meant to indicate that the application is temporarily unresponsive, a state from which the application should recover. It also may indicate that all or part of the application has entered an unrecoverable state or an infinite loop. During this time the user may be prevented from closing, resizing, or even minimizing the windows of the affected application (although moving the window is still possible in OS X, as well as previously hidden parts of the window being usually redrawn, even when the application is otherwise unresponsive). While one application is unresponsive, typically other applications are usable. File system and network delays are another common cause.
Guidelines, tools and methods for developers[edit]
By default, events (and any actions they initiate) are processed sequentially, which works well when each event involves a trivial amount of processing, the spinning wait cursor appearing until the operation is complete. If processing takes long, the application will appear unresponsive. Developers may prevent this by using separate threads for lengthy processing, allowing the application's main thread to continue responding to external events. However, this greatly increases the application complexity. Another approach is to divide the work into smaller packets and use NSRunLoop or Grand Central Dispatch.
- Bugs in applications can cause them to stop responding to events; for instance, an infinite loop or a deadlock. Applications thus afflicted rarely recover.
- Problems with the virtual memory system—such as slow paging caused by a spun-down hard disk or disk read-errors—will cause the wait cursor to appear across multiple applications, until the hard disk and virtual memory system recover.
Instruments is an application that comes with the Mac OS X Developer Tools. Along with its other functions, it allows the user to monitor and sample applications that are either not responding or performing a lengthy operation. Each time an application does not respond and the spinning wait cursor is activated, Instruments can sample the process to determine which code is causing the application to stop responding. With this information, the developer can rewrite code to avoid the cursor being activated.
Apple's guidelines suggest that developers try to avoid invoking the spinning wait cursor, and suggest other user interface indicators, such as an asynchronous progress indicator.
Alternate names[edit]
The spinning wait cursor is commonly referred to as the (Spinning) x (of Death/Doom).[d] The most common words or phrases x can be replaced with include:
- Disk
- (Beach) Ball[11][12]
- (Rainbow) wheel
- Pinwheel
- Pizza[e]
- Pie
- Marble
- Lollipop
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^NeXT Optical Discs, Photo of the underside, showing the rainbow effect depicted on the icon (a then new type of media that was built into the early NeXT Cubes.)
- ^often an external AppleCD drive was used
- ^not a single bit was changed
- ^named after the Blue Screen of Death
- ^frequently encountered across Mac users forums as The SPOD
References[edit]
- ^'Mini-Tutorial: The dreaded spinning pinwheel; Avoiding unresponsiveness/slow-downs in Mac OS X'. CNet. 10 March 2005. Retrieved 16 July 2012.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^'macOS Human Interface Guidelines: Pointers'. developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
- ^'Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball'. Macworld. 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
- ^'How to Fix a Spinning Wheel of Death on Mac'. MacPaw. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
- ^'Frozen: How to Force Quit an OS X App Showing a Spinning Beachball of Death – The Mac Observer'. www.macobserver.com. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
- ^'Using the Cursor Utilities (IM: Im)'. Developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2010-04-30.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^'SetAnimatedThemeCursor'. Developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2010-04-30.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^Macworld 2002-04-01
- ^Ars Technica Jaguar review: 'The dreading 'spinning rainbow disc' has an all new look in Jaguar'
- ^'WWDC 2012 – Session 709 – What's New in the File System'(PDF). Apple. Retrieved 2018-05-23.
Applications SPOD if they don't service the event loop for two seconds
CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link) - ^Swain, Gregory E. (28 May 2010). 'Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball'. ((MacWorld)). Retrieved 16 July 2012.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^Todd, Charlie (9 March 2012). 'Spinning Beach Ball of Death'. ((Improv Everywhere)). Retrieved 16 July 2012.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
External links[edit]
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Standard Cursors from Apple's website.
- Perceived Responsiveness: Avoid the Spinning Cursor from Apple's website.
- Troubleshooting the 'Spinning Beach Ball of Death' Excerpt from 'Troubleshooting Mac OS X' book where there are some information on how to deal with Spinning Wait Cursor problems.
System cleanup in one click
Few things give Mac users that sinking feeling more than the sight of a spinning color wheel, rainbow wheel, spinning beach ball of death or SBBOD as it's also commonly known. It's official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, and it's a system indicator. signifies that macOS cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.
Why does it happen? It's a sign that an application is trying to deal with more processes than it can handle at any given time. Sometimes it will last only a few seconds and disappear, when processing cycles are freed up and the application is able to process all the tasks it needs to. Other times, the application will become persistently unresponsive and 'hang'. When that happens, the only solution is to force quit the app.
Fix Spinning Wheel on Mac
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Quick ways to stop spinning wheel
To fix an application stuck with a spinning cursor:
- If and get rid of a spinning ballyou know which app is hanging, press Cmd-alt-escape and you'll see the Force Quit dialog box. The problematic app will be shown as 'not responding.'
- Select the app and press Force Quit. The app should now quit and the rainbow wheel will disappear.
- If the app refuses to force quit, or force quitting doesn't fix the problem, the next step is to restart your Mac.
How to stop the rainbow wheel issue
Getting rid of a spinning beachball is only part of the solution. As we said above, it's a symptom, not a cause of problems. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to prevent it. The first is to identify which applications are putting the greatest strain on your Mac.
The Wheel (ahmedhaddaji) Mac Os Catalina
iStatMenus, available in Setapp, is a powerful performance monitoring tools for your Mac. It sits in your Mac's Finder menu bar and allows you to easily check which apps are hogging processor cycles or RAM. And helps you see how well or badly your Mac is running. If you need more detailed information, or need to quit specific processes (rather than applications), you can launch Activity Monitor from within iStatMenus.
The combination of iStatMenus and Activity Monitor will lead you to the apps that are overloading your Mac. The next step is to uninstall them completely and reinstall them, making sure you remove all the temporary and preference files associated with it.
Litter bomber mac os. The easiest way to do that is to use CleanMyMac, also available in Setapp. Here's what you should do.
Uninstall apps and extensions
- Launch Setapp and search for CleanMyMac. Click install and wait for it to install and launch.
- Look in the sidebar for the Application section and click Uninstaller. The window on the right will fill up with all the apps you have installed on your Mac. Find the one you want to uninstall and click on the checkbox next to it. Click Uninstall at the bottom of the main window.
It's a good idea to remove any apps you don't use. You'll free up disk space and could prevent conflicts with other apps.
Re-index Spotlight
Spotlight is an incredibly useful tool for searching for files on your Mac, among many other things. In order to search your Mac, Spotlight needs to build and maintain an index. Occasionally that index can become corrupt and when that happens, the dreaded spinning color wheel is likely to appear. https://truepfiles842.weebly.com/starcraft-2-protoss-gameplay.html. Here's how to fix it.
- In CleanMyMac, click on the Maintenance in the left sidebar.
- Click the checkbox next to Reindex Spotlight.
- Click Run.
Free up disk space
macOS uses your startup disk to host virtual RAM and then regularly reads and writes files to it. If you don't have enough free space (at least 10% of the disk's total capacity), your Mac will struggle noticeably and you'll see the spinning beachball more often.
To free up disk space, you can either manually trawl through your startup disk backing up important files and then deleting them, or use Get Backup Pro or ChronoSync Express to back up the disk and then use CleanMyMac to free up disk space. It's a good idea to use Disk Drill to analyse the disk and identify which files are taking up the most space. Disk Drill and ChronoSync Express are available in Setapp.
- In CleanMyMac, click on Smart Scan and then click Scan.
- Wait for it to finish, then click on each section in turn and click Review Details.
The results can be enlightening. For example, we found that cache files for the Photos app were taking up 8GB space on our Mac. Uncheck and items you don't want to remove and then click Clean. Repeat for the other categories.
For more information on how to free up space on your Mac, we prepare these quick tips.
Install more RAM
If none of the above, there is one final thing you can try. As we mentioned above, the spinning beachball can appear when your Mac is using virtual memory and storage space is limited. The more physical RAM you have, the less your Mac will need to resort to virtual memory.
So, installing more RAM will mean you see the spinning color wheel less often. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it used to be to add more RAM to your Mac. You'll probably need to visit an Apple Store or an authorized service center and ask them to install it for you.
To prevent that from happening in the future, it's worth installing as much RAM as your Mac can take, or as much as you can afford when you first buy it. Money spent on RAM is never wasted and usually means your Mac will perform better for longer before you eventually need to replace it.
The good news is that replacing RAM is very much a last resort and that the other steps described above will, in many cases, solve the problem completely.
The Wheel (ahmedhaddaji) Mac Os X
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