Well Mac users, we’ve all been there – you’re spending tireless hours working on your final term paper, creating a masterpiece on Illustrator, or saving your Photoshop project that’s due at midnight, when suddenly, the dreaded spinning pinwheel (AKA the spinning beach ball of death) appears on your screen. Panic quickly follows as you wonder if this little death ball, disguised in a cute rainbow facade, will destroy all of the progress you made since your last save. “Oh no…. when did I last save?!” You think to yourself.
A minute passes. The beach ball continues to spin.
Here’s how we completely fixed a rainbow spinning wheel of death inflicted Mac Mini (late 2012, Server) running Mojave Mac OS. Before the following measures, the Mac was devastatingly slow and taking an age to open apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, Photoshop, Illustrator and then being taken over by the spinning beach ball leading to force quits and loss of work. Explore the world of Mac. Check out MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini, and more. Visit the Apple site to learn, buy, and get support. Dec 29, 2020 Your Mac hijacking your cursor and asking you to wait around is never welcome. People call it different things, including the spinning wheel, beachball, or pinwheel of death. The good news is a spinning wheel means macOS hasn’t crashed completely. You might be able to wrestle back control. 1 day ago Persistent Spinning Wheel of Death Issues. If the steps above didn’t resolve your issues, it might not be such an easy fix. There could be several things contributing to a slow Mac or persistent spinning wheel of death, but some likely culprits are insufficient storage space or issues with your device's available memory. Declutter Your Mac.
Two minutes go by now. You feel a bead of sweat drip down your forehead. You click out of the application in hopes that when you go back to your project the wheel will be gone. It’s not. It’s taunting you now. What a jerk.
Danny mac os. After a brief stage of denial, you realize that the fate of your project depends on some smooth recovery skills. So how do save your work from almost certain death?
Sometimes waiting it out is a good enough solution, but it doesn’t always help, and the time lost while waiting makes it less efficient. Although we can’t guarantee a 100% success rate on all beach ball instances, here is a simple solution that works more often than not!
Here’s how to combat the spinning rainbow wheel of death:
- Stay Calm!
- Wait at least 15 – 30 seconds to see if the wheel will disappear on it’s own.
- If it doesn’t disappear, open your task manager by hitting Command + Option (alt) + Esc on your keyboard.
- DO NOT force quit the application. Sometimes doing this will allow you to recover the file, but it often doesn’t.
- Instead, go down to the bottom of the task manager list and RESTART the ‘Finder‘.
- Wait a few seconds for the Finder to restart.
- Go back to your application to see if the spinning wheel is gone (Usually it is – Hooray!)
- Celebrate your victory by saving your project immediately and maybe backing it up in a couple of places, because you never know!
- Do a happy dance!
Payback mac os. The first time we tried this method we were stunned. It actually worked, and it’s been a lifesaver for us ever since! Leave us a comment in our comment section below to let us know if it worked for you!
If this method didn’t work you can try to restart your finder a second time. If it still doesn’t work you may be dealing with a RAM issue on your computer. In future, try not to have too many files opened in your applications while you are working, and only keep applications that you are actively using opened. Sometimes when you have more than one or two applications going at the same time they will slow your computer speed down, which can summon the ‘ol beachball forth.
Gifs from Make a Gif & Giphy
HOW TO GET MORE WEBSITE TRAFFICAdobe Sensei: The Most Intuitive AI Platform on the Market
Spinning Wait Cursor as seen in OS X El Capitan
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]
Death Wheel Mac Os Downloads
From NeXTStep to Mac OS X[edit]
NeXTStep monochrome (2 bit)
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.
NeXTStep color (12 bit)
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]
Mac OS X (24 bit)
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. Flightcontrol mac os. 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] 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)
Death Wheel Mac Os X
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.
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spinning_pinwheel&oldid=1012710173'