Name of spinning ball thingy when computer is thinking

Though I don't know the official name, I have for bizarre reasons known only to myself, kept a list of various references to that device, which has included;

little swirly.
Mr Spinny.
beachball
Spinning beachball.
swirling beachball
Spinning wheels
Spinning BeachBall Of Death (Dr Smoke's morbid take on it)
progress wheel
spinning circle
spinning colored icon
spinning colour wheel
processing wheel that never ends
red rolling ball (that's what they said)
rainbow wheel
endless spinball
the spinning coloured mouse curser
agonizing rainbow spinning wheel (and the poster also said)
hypno-coin (and)
prismatic sphere of perpetual motion (and)
spectral spinner
the spinning pizza wheel
spinning colored disc
beachballing (Verb)
rolling rainbow
little swirley load thing (beautiful)
the loading spinner
spinning disk
swirling rainbow mode
rainbow swirl thing
eternal ball

🙂

people usually call it beach ball. Don't know how official that is.

I think its technical name is SPOD... Spinning Pizza of Death.

If you are seeing it a lot I suggest you delete all files in the folder
/private/var/vm

then reboot. Note that the folder is invisible and you will have to use the "Go to Folder" menu to open the folder.

I think it's called a spinning wait cursor.

I'd call it aggravation...

A nice name is the "rainbow pinwheel", a not so nice name is the "***** rainbow beach ball of death"

SBBOD spinning beach ball of death

Yup, official name is the Spinning wait cursor, but I refer to it as the Spinning Beachball of Death (SBBOD).

MarkDouma® wrote:
Yup, official name is the Spinning wait cursor, but I refer to it as the Spinning Beachball of Death (SBBOD).

It's only Death if it spins for a long time. SBBOD is not an apt name when it simply spins for a fraction of a second, which can be normal under some circumstances

the REAL official name is called the Spinning PinWheel

Whatever it's called, it's another example of crappy design.

Even if an application is waiting for something to finish, depending on the cause of the delay, mouse-click events may be stored in the buffer and a user familiar with this behaviour can often complete a few clicks, sort of in advance, then switch to something else.

The current design of the SPOD with its large size and the fact that the "hot point" is in the centre means that the target a user is trying to click may be completely obscured by the mouse pointer, forcing the user to guess where they are clicking.

You would think a company once known for "user friendly" design would be clued in to this sort of detail. Although some apps did use a black and white spinning disk that had the same drawback as the SPOD, from what I recall, the Mac OS for the most part used a watch icon with the "hot point" at the corner of the watch band. With a clearly defined corner, there was no guessing.

It isn't a huge issue by itself, but it counts as one of those "little things" - a little annoyance that adds to user frustration, when it could be, if implemented properly, one of the "little things" that you might not notice at all but when you do, makes you realize that some actual thought went into the design.

I disagree with storing mouse clicks in advance, as then you run into situation where inexperienced users will be clicking all over the screen and then once the process has finished, lots of events all happening at once, and deluging the screen with activity. Better to just let the process finish. You can always use another application whilst its working.

I do agree with the hot-point thing though - every mouse pointer should have a clearly defined area - perhaps the next design of the pinwheel could have a tiny black triangle in the top left as the pointer.

add this one:

the rainbow cyclone of doom

I've always heard of BBOD or SBBOD for "Beach Ball of Death"...That's what I've always referred to it as...