The SRCD

zo

otherwise known as the Spinning Rainbow Cursor of Death soon to become the SACD (or Spinning Aqua Curson of Death). What is it actually?



I remember reading that its something that actually comes over from NeXT and that it is patented or something like that. To show that a process is working but stalled... something like that.



But is there something more behind it? Howsit work?

ghost_user_name

It is actually a spinning optical disc from the NeXT cube days. It is invoked by the kernel when an application has stopped responding to input for two seconds.



How it works is rather simple. As the kernel already manages tasks, it can know when a certain task is stalled. After a set period of time, it uses the spinning cursor as a notification to the user that the frontmost process has stalled. I believe the Server version of Mac OS X also has an option to relaunch stalled processes and I would guess that it uses a similar monitoring and timing technique as is used with the SRCD.



In Jaguar, however, a few minor changes are being made. Everything is basically the same except that the kernel can now notify the window server to use the new Aqua beachball (that's right -- it's an aquafied version of the old black & white spinning beachball).



[ 06-02-2002: Message edited by: starfleetX ]</p>