While the Apple Style Guide (PDF) specifies that the SBBOD is officially named the spinning wait cursor, most AppleCare Knowledge Base articles about the SBBOD call it the spinning disc pointer.

'Sometimes when your Mac is hard at work, your pointer may temporarily turn into a colorful spinning disc, which generally indicates that a task is in progress.'.

The second definition is in the AppleCare® Knowledge Base document 'Mac 101: Mac Essentials': Here, window server is the background process WindowServer, whose primary task is running the Mac OS X windowing system, i.e. If an application does not respond for about 2 to 4 seconds, the spinning wait cursor appears.'

'The spinning wait cursor is displayed automatically by the window server when an application cannot handle all of the events it receives.

The first definition is in the 'User Experience Guidelines' chapter of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

The SBBOD appears briefly, but frequently in your Web browser.Īpple® defines the spinning wait cursor in two documents.

The SBBOD spins continuously while loading a specific Web page.

The SBBOD and a 'slow script' alert appear while loading a Web page.

Resolving SBBOD problems in Web browsers:.

The SBBOD appears when quitting an application.The SBBOD appears continuously in all applications.The SBBOD appears continuously in one application.The SBBOD appears when accessing a hard disk or optical drive.

The SBBOD appears temporarily, but frequently in most applications.

The SBBOD appears frequently during your work.

This FAQ derived from a corresponding chapter in our Troubleshooting Mac OS X e-book discusses solving common SBBOD problems, both generally and in Web browsers. However, there are cases when the 'beach ball' spins protractedly, a condition colloquially known as 'The Spinning Beach Ball of Death' (SBBOD). In most cases, the 'beach ball' disappears within several seconds. For example, applying a Gaussian blur to an image in Adobe® Photoshop® is a processor-intensive activity. The spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer where your mouse pointer becomes the rotating color wheel or 'spinning beach ball' seen above generally indicates that your Mac® is engaged in a processor-intensive activity.

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