Mac Mail 6 is missing the "spinning wheel" indicator when checking for new mail

Brewersd wrote:

As someone who posted regarding the spinning wheel some time ago, it is actually an industry standard and appears with most apps when the app itself or the system is waiting (sometimes coloured). Even during computer shutdown or startup there is a spinning wheel.

I just opened a few Mail clients, ones that could be called 'Standards' by virtue of the fact that they dominate the general market and virtually own the corporate market. I speak of Outlook, which in Windows or Mac guise does not sport a spinning wheel indicator.

Fair enough. I should have written APPLE standard.

Maybe talk about a spinning wheel is wrong. I just want an indicator that Mail is actually doing something when I either press the Get Mail button or hit Cmd/Shift/N. Outlook was mentioned, when you hit the Get Mail on that app a bar appears at the bottom to show progress.

I've been trying really hard to stay out of this as it goes on and on and on but in reply to this, there is an indicator that Mail is actually doing something. In fact there are two.
In the menu: Window > Activity
At the bottom of the mailboxes column, little square with a triangle in it > Mail Activity

To jayv,

Hunh? The Mail Activity section below the mailboxes column does indeed show when an email is getting sucked down to my machine or being blown out into the network but otherwise it shows nothing. If I click the get mail button and there is no mail to get, it shows nothing. And, with the new layout of the Mail.app I find it best to keep the mailboxes column shrunk over to the side so I can actually see the entire width of an email. As far as the Window > Activity window. It's a separate window that gets covered with other windows when I actually do something with my computer. It can't tell me anything when it's hidden behind the main Mail.app window.

To be clear, what I found useful with the old spinning wheel was that it showed me if the Mail.app was still trying to connect to my durn email server (and was maybe hung) or if the Mail app was already done and just waiting for the next important message. Yes, the current app does show a lightning bolt sqwiggle thing over the email count for an account that tried to check but had a failure. That's good. But it feels like it's telling me less than the old app did. Less feedback = less human. Hal was more human than this.

H

Bring back the wheel or perhaps re-invent i!.

For me indication of processing is essential. Safari shows progress of a loading web page as a light blue bar behind the url window which helps my patience a lot. I don't think anyone likes to press a button and see absolutely nothing happen. Basic UX design isn't it?

Apple use the spinning wheel in quite a few apps. It is yet another so called improvement in Mavericks which is basically poitless to remove. If you were deaf and could not hear the stupid bleep that sounds after clicking on the daft little icon (all the icons in Mail are now feeble and made for a 10 year old with 20/20 vision) how would you know that Mail had actually attempted to retrieve your emails? There are countless problems created by Apple in Mavericks and it is hard to see why they bothered creating such a poor replacement for existing platforms without thinking it through and testing it properly and getting feedback from outside the company as, in-house they are deluded far too often and make poor decisions. 🙂

So, when are Apple goijng to put the spinning cog back in Mavericks Mail App please?

Tell them that you want it back.

I have, through the official Mail feedback form in Mail toolbar, however, Apple appear to be blind and deaf so, is there any point? The Mail app in 10.6.8 was the last proper email app that worked really well and was visually good to use and had good features. Apple apper to have a policy to ruin things that work properly across a lot of platforms. The Mavericks Mail app is a pale shadow of the 10.6.8 and they managed to ruin it as soon as they developed Mountain Lion. The icons are dismal and the spinning cog needs to reappear.

martin from wrote:

I have, through the official Mail feedback form in Mail toolbar, however, Apple appear to be blind and deaf so, is there any point?

They are neither blind nor deaf, the fact that they have not rewritten the software because of your opinion is unsurprising. If there were enough people expressing the same opinion to them the decision might change.

I disagree. There was never a good reasion to change what clearly worked well across many platforms in 10.6.8 and was a better email App. Ruining something that worked is a poor design/software postion to adopt. Apple are culpable for making many bad decisions as, this is not something new and is a regular occurence. Mavericks may be free but it has a lot of problems and slows and disturbs things that worked well in earlier operating systems.

As I said before, you have an opinion, not shared by all users. What makes your opinion more important than theirs?

If enough people object it is fully possible that Apple will change it back.

I am not saying that my opinion is shared by all users. If you look on the internet and on Apple support forums my objections are mirrored by a lot of people. Apple push change for the sake of change because Apple-heads are so addicted to buying into ever changing formats. I do not believe that Apple are interested in looking at their own shortcomings as, they are stuck so firmly inside their own box that they do not see anything that they do not want to.

I would say that there are a lot of people who would like the spinning cog back as this symbol is used in lots of Apple Apps already and is there for a clear reason, in order that you can see what is happening. Unforunately Apple are rather like the Catholic church and it's 'My way or the highway'. Another clear exampple is Safari that is slower in Mavericks than earlier operating systems and slower than any other browser e'g. Firefox, even though Safari is Apple's own browser.