Color Pinwheel

[hackletip]

I just purchased an IMAC 27" OS Lion 10.7. On two occasions I have lost my cursor that turned into a twirling colored pinwheel. Both times I had to force quit from the program I was using. Each time I was asked to send a report to Apple. Does anyone know what causes this?

 

[Jare]

I just purchased an IMAC 27" OS Lion 10.7. On two occasions I have lost my cursor that turned into a twirling colored pinwheel. Both times I had to force quit from the program I was using. Each time I was asked to send a report to Apple. Does anyone know what causes this?

Obviously the program you were using had stopped responding.

 

[hackletip]

Obviously the program you were using had stopped responding.

So this is what I can expect to see when there is a failure in the program? Or does this pinwheel show up for other mishaps?

 

[maflynn]

So this is what I can expect to see when there is a failure in the program? Or does this pinwheel show up for other mishaps?

The spinning beachball of death shows up whenever a program takes too long to process events, that is it stops responding to OSX managing the program. Sometimes this is because its busy executing a task, most other times its because its hung and needs to be force closed.

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Here's a nicely detailed explanation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor