Apple’s macOS spinning pinwheel is used to indicate a busy application and comes with more than a handful of names. You will often see the spinning wait cursor being referred to as a beach ball, a wheel of death, or a rainbow disk. Some even go to the extremity of calling it a spinning pizza of doom. Patience may be a virtue, but in the case of Mac OS X's dreaded spinning pinwheel process indicator, even the most tranquil users can find themselves more than a tad anxious for the standard arrow.

The rainbow-colored circle is a painful sight to see for Mac users. If you’re lucky it disappears in a few seconds, but more often it remains for minutes, leaving you helplessly locked out of the app or your whole Mac. Since it’s not always clear how to deal with with the wheeling cursor or what caused it in the first place, let’s break it all down. In this article we’ll take a look at what is the spinning beach ball, why and when it shows up, and what you can do about it.

The spinning wheel usually appears when an application freezes, or overloads your Mac's processing power. Checking your Mac's available storage space and RAM capacity can shed light on the. I experience this on both a new-ish 2017 MBPro with 16 Gb Ram and my older Mac Mini quad-core - only after upgrading them to Mojave. I think the culprit is indeed Messages w iCloud. I have 7.8 Gb of Messages data in iCloud and when I signed out of iCloud and then back in, my whole machine slowed and the fan is spinning.

What is a spinning color wheel?

Initially, it’s a system indicator. It’s official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, not so official — the Spinning Beach Ball of Death or SBBOD. The ball signifies that your Mac cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.

Spinning

Every app on your Mac has a so-called window server. When an app receives more events than it can process, the window server automatically shows you the spinning ball. It usually takes about 4 seconds for the app to decide that it’s non-responsive.

Why does the Mac spinning wheel of death appear?

Well, the reasons are countless. First, it can be a stand-alone issue with a certain app. Second, it could be faulty hardware or insufficient RAM. We’ll go over each possible issue and see how it can be fixed, depending on the cause. Sometimes, the only way out it getting a new Mac, but most of the cases can be fixed with the right software or system commands.

How to stop the spinning ball on Mac?

In case you just need unlock one frozen application, that’s a job for Force Quit.

To fix an application stuck with a spinning cursor right now:

  1. Click the Apple icon in the top left corner.
  2. Choose Force Quit (or press cmd+alt+esc).
  3. Select the app that won’t respond.
  4. Click Force Quit.

Simply shutting down the process is a brutal way of problem solving and it doesn’t address the issue that caused the freezing. It could have been an accidental glitch in the program, but if it keeps freezing or spreads further to other software and services, you need to look deeper.

What if the application keeps freezing when you open it again?

Reset or reinstall the freezing application. Macs don’t have a proper uninstaller and moving applications to the Trash bin leaves plenty of app leftovers. Some of them could be the reason why the spinning wheel showed up, so if you leave them the issue will stay.

How to reset a Mac app to its default settings or uninstall it

There are two ways to reset apps: one would be to use application’s own preferences or settings and look for reset options there. But in case the app won’t let you do that (because it keeps freezing), you can turn to third-party solutions, like CleanMyMac X for instance. It’s a handy app for Mac maintenance and cleaning with plenty of useful tools, including reset and uninstallation.

  1. Download CleanMyMac X, an app for Mac maintenance.
  2. Open it and click on the Uninstaller.
  3. Select the app you need to reset from the list.
  4. Click on the small arrow next to the application icon
  5. Click Applications Reset.

If the beach ball keeps rolling when you use the app again, reinstall it completely by pressing Uninstall instead or Reset. Remember, simply moving the app to the Trash doesn’t do the trick, since its leftover files remain on your hard drive.

Important: if you have a licence for the paid app, makes sure to save the number somewhere.

What if your whole Mac becomes unresponsive?

Possible issue: Overworked processor

One of the reasons for the wheel to show up could be that your Mac is getting old. You can figure out if that’s the case by checking the CPU usage. To check the CPU usage, turn to Activity monitor. Find it in the Applications/Utilities folder or run a Spotlight search. Or, if you have CleanMyMac X, use it’s Menu in the top bar.

The bottom table shows System load in percentage. If it’s way above 50% and remains there for long, especially without any specific reason like games or heavy rendering programs, this might be the signal your processor is the bottleneck.

Fix: If your processor is overworking regularly, only buying a new Mac will fix the problem entirely. Sorry.

Possible issue: Low disk space

Play the forest online free. You don’t even need to have a full startup disk to see the nasty ball. Just a heavily loaded hard drive, with lots of large files can already cause troubles with loading.

Fix: Hard drive cleanup. Thankfully, that’s an easy task. You can get CleanMyMac X and in free up tons of space in a few minutes. With CleanMyMac you don’t need to dig into folders and look for files you don’t need, the app will find and sort them, plus all the system junk your Mac has been accumulating for months.

Possible issue: Insufficient RAM

Another possible hardware issue is insufficient Random Access Memory. To figure out if you need more RAM, open the Activity Monitor again. It’s in the Applications/Utilities folder. In the Memory tab, you can see Memory pressure table with a graph. If the graph is red and your memory is constantly strained under all the running apps, you’ve found the problem.

Fix: You can upgrade RAM by buying and installing more of it. It’s usually enough to have 8 GB for most tasks and applications, apart from heavy video rendering and the likes. Here’s a detailed guide on how to upgrade RAM on Mac.

Spinning Maze Mac Os Download

That’s about it concerning the spinning beach ball and how to deal with it. We hope this guide has been of help and you’ll stop the spinning wheel of death on your Mac once and for all.

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'.

Sink simulator mac os. 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 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.

How to open ios simulator. 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] 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]

https://besthfil551.weebly.com/escape-from-gobblet-gulch-mac-os.html. 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]

  1. ^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.)
  2. ^often an external AppleCD drive was used
  3. ^not a single bit was changed
  4. ^named after the Blue Screen of Death
  5. ^frequently encountered across Mac users forums as The SPOD

References[edit]

  1. ^'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)
  2. ^'macOS Human Interface Guidelines: Pointers'. developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  3. ^'Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball'. Macworld. 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
  4. ^'How to Fix a Spinning Wheel of Death on Mac'. MacPaw. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
  5. ^'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.
  6. ^'Using the Cursor Utilities (IM: Im)'. Developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2010-04-30.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  7. ^'SetAnimatedThemeCursor'. Developer.apple.com. Retrieved 2010-04-30.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  8. ^Macworld 2002-04-01
  9. ^Ars Technica Jaguar review: 'The dreading 'spinning rainbow disc' has an all new look in Jaguar'
  10. ^'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 secondsCS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  11. ^Swain, Gregory E. (28 May 2010). 'Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball'. ((MacWorld)). Retrieved 16 July 2012.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  12. ^Todd, Charlie (9 March 2012). 'Spinning Beach Ball of Death'. ((Improv Everywhere)). Retrieved 16 July 2012.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Spinning Maze Mac Os Pro

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.
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