Am I the only one here that hates all the versions of the spinning beach ball? I mean, the watch was with us since the first Macintosh, and it is still the best, in all its black-and-white glory. Think about it: what meaning does the 'spinning beach ball' convey? To me, it conveys the image of a spinning beach ball, hence the origin of the nick-name. The watch conveyed the meaning of, "please wait", which is the purpose of the widget in the first place.
Why cant we have a nice, Aqua-ised watch? That would put the f***ing 'beach ball', blue or rainbow, to its rightful place in history, while placing the watch back in its rightful place, as the modern-spawn of a sacred stronghold of the Macintosh GUI.
No band, though. Just the watch face . .
(Edit: I hate grammatical oddities/errors. I edit my posts a lot )
Mac OS X, nice point! I believe Apple is really losing sight with the whole "Desktop" metaphor. It's gotten better since 10.0, but still... A Watch just makes sense. I could picture some very cool Aquafied versions of the watch. I wish we could skin this!
Anyhow, the blue beachball is the best! Maybe that's just because blue is my favorite color...
<strong>Am I the only one here that hates all the versions of the spinning beach ball? I mean, the watch was with us since the first Macintosh, and it is still the best, in all its black-and-white glory. Think about it: what meaning does the 'spinning beach ball' convey? To me, it conveys the image of a spinning beach ball, hence the origin of the nick-name. The watch conveyed the meaning of, "please wait", which is the purpose of the widget in the first place.
Why cant we have a nice, Aqua-ised watch? That would put the f***ing 'beach ball', blue or rainbow, to its rightful place in history, while placing the watch back in its rightful place, as the modern-spawn of a sacred stronghold of the Macintosh GUI.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I remember the black and white beach ball from 1990 on System 6.0.x when I was using the Mac LC. I always thought of it as a black and white BMW logo. For a while there, it was a true blue and white BMW logo. More recent builds I've tried are rainbow colored.
The beach ball doesnt symbolize a "wait" its for stuck or stalled processes thats why when your in one program and it stalls or stops ex IE and you move the cursor over the desktop the beachball goes away... mulittasking... if your in IE and you "wait" for a page to load you will get a watch.
<strong>The beach ball doesnt symbolize a "wait" its for stuck or stalled processes thats why when your in one program and it stalls or stops ex IE and you move the cursor over the desktop the beachball goes away... mulittasking... if your in IE and you "wait" for a page to load you will get a watch.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, I think you are a bit off here. NO apps should ever throw up the old busy "stopwatch" or "b&w beach ball" cursor. If an app is written properly, there should be only one wait cursor -- the one the kernel throws up when an app has halted input for over two seconds. So, yes, it is a "please wait" cursor.
The only reason Internet Explorer throws up the old cursors is because is STILL isn't properly coded for Mac OS X. It uses the old event loop method for much of its work. That's also why it's often so painfully slow at multitasking. If it was properly threaded, the old wait cursors would simply disappear, as they wouldn't be needed. Why should IE have to rely on a cursor to tell you it is busy loading a page? Isn't the spinning "e"/globe logo enough feedback?
Ever seen either the stopwatch or b&w beach ball cursors in a Cocoa app? Nope. That's because they simply can't exist. If I recall correctly, they're only in Mac OS X as legacy code for Carbon apps that still aren't up to spec.
Let's think about this for a moment. Seriously, why should there be more than one "wait" cursor? If IE stalls and throws up the stopwatch cursor, the app is frozen. You can't do anything but wait. How is this **from the end user's perspective** any different from the aqua spinning disc cursor? In both cases the user can do nothing. In both cases the app is frozen. In both cases the user just has to wait until the app returns to normal. In both cases the user can switch to another app to work while waiting.
Anyhow, I do agree that the aqua spinning disc cursor needs to change. Right not it represents a beach ball. Yay fun! You can be tossing around a beach ball on your Mac! What does it mean to a newbie? Probably nothing, but at least he can think it's a fun new toy when he sees it.
Maybe I'm too used to X-Windows, but I think the beach ball icon should change to a regular cursor (or at least _something_ different) when I move my mouse out of the window that's frozen.
I can't count how many times I thought my whole machine was frozen because the icon didn't change when I moved it over another window.
Er, it changes when you *move it off the window*, or when you *change to another app*?
The latter has always been the case, the former would be... well, kind of nifty, although it breaks the front-most window focus that the Mac has always had. (Although, it does reflect better the state of what the cursor is currently over... hmmm... not sure how I feel about that one.)
Does the obverse apply? If you're in a currently non-wait-state app, and move the cursor over a wait-state app's window, does it change to the wait cursor? *THAT* could get *REALLY* confusing.
<strong>Er, it changes when you *move it off the window*, or when you *change to another app*?
Does the obverse apply? If you're in a currently non-wait-state app, and move the cursor over a wait-state app's window, does it change to the wait cursor?</strong><hr></blockquote>
[edit: major correction <img src="graemlins/embarrassed.gif" border="0" alt="[Embarrassed]" /> ]
Say you're working in Mail.app and it freezes up. The cursor will become the aqua spinning disc. It should stay that cursor until you switch to another app. (I believe this is correct; it's been a while since I saw an app totally freeze up.)
If I switch to iTunes, this is the area where the cursor will turn to the "waiting" state.
So we've got window-focus cursors for app readiness feedback, but not for UI input.
Okay, even I think that's weird, and I've worked with both window-focus and front-most-focus systems.
(Oh sure, *make* me edit... )
So it's feedback for apps you might click into if the current one is not waiting, but if the current one is waiting, then it doesn't give you feedback on other apps.
God, it just gets worse.
While I appreciate the attempt to provide feedback to the user (and I can think of when this would be very helpful), this just seems like a nightmare to try to explain to, say, my Mom. (She's my litmus test - if I can explain it to her, anyone can get it.)
If the frontmost app is on hold, it should, IMHO, still provide feedback on other apps' waitstates if possible. (And since the cursor isn't tied to the frontmost apps' event loop, it *is* possible.)
I hope that you just haven't had a chance to get a wait state app in the front, and that what I'm hoping for is the actual behaviour...
Brad I have IE dog out on me all the time all i have to do is remove my cable connection and quit IE, pretty big bug, but if i dont switch apps and move the curser of the window it will change to none waiting state its been a couple of hours sence last time it did this but i`m 90% sure you dont have to switch apps
Anyway, I'm fairly sure I'm right. I *always* get the spinning wait cursor for a few seconds when launching Photoshop, and when I tried that just now, I kept the cursor *off* of the splash window. It turned to the spinning wait cursor anyway.
I`ll get 2 screen shots of it next time it does locks up if I can. Trying to catch OS X crashing is alot like trying to find a leprechaun and steal his gold...
Brad, I think that's because it's a 'splash screen'. At that point, unless you click on another window, the entire screen is owned by PhotoShop. So your beach ball spins.
I have moved a spinning beach ball off a hanging app's window and it has turned back to a pointer numerous times.
Well, hell! Why stop at the beach ball? Why doesnt Apple replace it with, like, a pair of scissors cutting? Oh, wait! How about clapping hands! Noooo . . . . a moving mouth! A rotating Coca-cola can! A DOORKNOW OPENING! A BASKETBALL GOING THROUGH A NET!!!
Sure! it wont matter, because we all will be able to deduce what the meaning of it is anyway! ughh! ughh!
Maybe this needs to be put in perspective for some of you: WINDOWS HAS A 'WAIT' WIDGET THAT MAKES MORE SENSE THAN THE SYSTEM 10 ONE! WINDOWS HAD A BETTER ONE IN 1995 THAN MAC OS 10 DOES NOW!
Rappelons ! C'est les petites choses qui importent !
How come the cursor in Windows is almost always perfectly updated depending on what it's above or what the computer is doing?
This is much more intuitive and really should be the case in OS X too in my opinion.
And as for the "total" wait cursor we have...I still haven't seen one on my brothers Windows XP system... <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
I really don`t care what it is shaped like I just want it to look better. OS X is so nice looking then you get this lame beach ball when a thread is waiting for somethng. I guess i`m just protesting and what the one from the WWDC build back
<strong>Heh. Sorry, MMF, but I don't use IE. Bleh.
That must explain why my Mac never locks up.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure I'm right. I *always* get the spinning wait cursor for a few seconds when launching Photoshop, and when I tried that just now, I kept the cursor *off* of the splash window. It turned to the spinning wait cursor anyway.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, it seems that that is not correct.
Running 6C115 here, and I was just doing some Photoshop work this morning while surfing the web. I clicked back on a rather large PS document and got the beachball. Remembering this thread, I moved the cursor off of the document and over my desktop, and the mouse returned to the pointer. Moving it over any part of Photoshop (menus, palettes, documents) would display the beachball, but over anything else, the regular cursor would show.
Thats what I thought, Do you think if we get enough people, sence apple listens to everyone, we can get them to change it off the horrid soon to be Aqua beachball?
Do you think we could all agree on something here in this thread and submit it to apple?
Comments
Why cant we have a nice, Aqua-ised watch? That would put the f***ing 'beach ball', blue or rainbow, to its rightful place in history, while placing the watch back in its rightful place, as the modern-spawn of a sacred stronghold of the Macintosh GUI.
No band, though. Just the watch face . .
(Edit: I hate grammatical oddities/errors. I edit my posts a lot
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Mac OS X ]</p>
Anyhow, the blue beachball is the best! Maybe that's just because blue is my favorite color...
<strong>Am I the only one here that hates all the versions of the spinning beach ball? I mean, the watch was with us since the first Macintosh, and it is still the best, in all its black-and-white glory. Think about it: what meaning does the 'spinning beach ball' convey? To me, it conveys the image of a spinning beach ball, hence the origin of the nick-name. The watch conveyed the meaning of, "please wait", which is the purpose of the widget in the first place.
Why cant we have a nice, Aqua-ised watch? That would put the f***ing 'beach ball', blue or rainbow, to its rightful place in history, while placing the watch back in its rightful place, as the modern-spawn of a sacred stronghold of the Macintosh GUI.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I remember the black and white beach ball from 1990 on System 6.0.x when I was using the Mac LC. I always thought of it as a black and white BMW logo. For a while there, it was a true blue and white BMW logo. More recent builds I've tried are rainbow colored.
<strong>The beach ball doesnt symbolize a "wait" its for stuck or stalled processes thats why when your in one program and it stalls or stops ex IE and you move the cursor over the desktop the beachball goes away... mulittasking... if your in IE and you "wait" for a page to load you will get a watch.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, I think you are a bit off here. NO apps should ever throw up the old busy "stopwatch" or "b&w beach ball" cursor. If an app is written properly, there should be only one wait cursor -- the one the kernel throws up when an app has halted input for over two seconds. So, yes, it is a "please wait" cursor.
The only reason Internet Explorer throws up the old cursors is because is STILL isn't properly coded for Mac OS X. It uses the old event loop method for much of its work. That's also why it's often so painfully slow at multitasking. If it was properly threaded, the old wait cursors would simply disappear, as they wouldn't be needed. Why should IE have to rely on a cursor to tell you it is busy loading a page? Isn't the spinning "e"/globe logo enough feedback?
Ever seen either the stopwatch or b&w beach ball cursors in a Cocoa app? Nope. That's because they simply can't exist. If I recall correctly, they're only in Mac OS X as legacy code for Carbon apps that still aren't up to spec.
Let's think about this for a moment. Seriously, why should there be more than one "wait" cursor? If IE stalls and throws up the stopwatch cursor, the app is frozen. You can't do anything but wait. How is this **from the end user's perspective** any different from the aqua spinning disc cursor? In both cases the user can do nothing. In both cases the app is frozen. In both cases the user just has to wait until the app returns to normal. In both cases the user can switch to another app to work while waiting.
Anyhow, I do agree that the aqua spinning disc cursor needs to change. Right not it represents a beach ball. Yay fun! You can be tossing around a beach ball on your Mac! What does it mean to a newbie? Probably nothing, but at least he can think it's a fun new toy when he sees it.
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
I can't count how many times I thought my whole machine was frozen because the icon didn't change when I moved it over another window.
The latter has always been the case, the former would be... well, kind of nifty, although it breaks the front-most window focus that the Mac has always had. (Although, it does reflect better the state of what the cursor is currently over... hmmm... not sure how I feel about that one.)
Does the obverse apply? If you're in a currently non-wait-state app, and move the cursor over a wait-state app's window, does it change to the wait cursor? *THAT* could get *REALLY* confusing.
<strong>Er, it changes when you *move it off the window*, or when you *change to another app*?
Does the obverse apply? If you're in a currently non-wait-state app, and move the cursor over a wait-state app's window, does it change to the wait cursor?</strong><hr></blockquote>
[edit: major correction <img src="graemlins/embarrassed.gif" border="0" alt="[Embarrassed]" /> ]
Say you're working in Mail.app and it freezes up. The cursor will become the aqua spinning disc. It should stay that cursor until you switch to another app. (I believe this is correct; it's been a while since I saw an app totally freeze up.)
If I switch to iTunes, this is the area where the cursor will turn to the "waiting" state.
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
Okay, even I think that's weird, and I've worked with both window-focus and front-most-focus systems.
(Oh sure, *make* me edit...
So it's feedback for apps you might click into if the current one is not waiting, but if the current one is waiting, then it doesn't give you feedback on other apps.
God, it just gets worse.
While I appreciate the attempt to provide feedback to the user (and I can think of when this would be very helpful), this just seems like a nightmare to try to explain to, say, my Mom. (She's my litmus test - if I can explain it to her, anyone can get it.)
If the frontmost app is on hold, it should, IMHO, still provide feedback on other apps' waitstates if possible. (And since the cursor isn't tied to the frontmost apps' event loop, it *is* possible.)
I hope that you just haven't had a chance to get a wait state app in the front, and that what I'm hoping for is the actual behaviour...
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Kickaha ]</p>
That must explain why my Mac never locks up.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure I'm right. I *always* get the spinning wait cursor for a few seconds when launching Photoshop, and when I tried that just now, I kept the cursor *off* of the splash window. It turned to the spinning wait cursor anyway.
I`ll get 2 screen shots of it next time it does locks up if I can. Trying to catch OS X crashing is alot like trying to find a leprechaun and steal his gold...
I have moved a spinning beach ball off a hanging app's window and it has turned back to a pointer numerous times.
Sure! it wont matter, because we all will be able to deduce what the meaning of it is anyway! ughh! ughh!
Maybe this needs to be put in perspective for some of you: WINDOWS HAS A 'WAIT' WIDGET THAT MAKES MORE SENSE THAN THE SYSTEM 10 ONE! WINDOWS HAD A BETTER ONE IN 1995 THAN MAC OS 10 DOES NOW!
Rappelons ! C'est les petites choses qui importent !
ESPECIALLY with Aqua and System 10.
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Mac OS X ]
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Mac OS X ]</p>
I must say I agree.
How come the cursor in Windows is almost always perfectly updated depending on what it's above or what the computer is doing?
This is much more intuitive and really should be the case in OS X too in my opinion.
And as for the "total" wait cursor we have...I still haven't seen one on my brothers Windows XP system... <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
[ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: a Martin ]</p>
<strong>Heh. Sorry, MMF, but I don't use IE. Bleh.
That must explain why my Mac never locks up.
Anyway, I'm fairly sure I'm right. I *always* get the spinning wait cursor for a few seconds when launching Photoshop, and when I tried that just now, I kept the cursor *off* of the splash window. It turned to the spinning wait cursor anyway.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, it seems that that is not correct.
Running 6C115 here, and I was just doing some Photoshop work this morning while surfing the web. I clicked back on a rather large PS document and got the beachball. Remembering this thread, I moved the cursor off of the document and over my desktop, and the mouse returned to the pointer. Moving it over any part of Photoshop (menus, palettes, documents) would display the beachball, but over anything else, the regular cursor would show.
FWIW anyway...
-Ender
Do you think we could all agree on something here in this thread and submit it to apple?