Forgive my idiocy, but what is a "spinning beachball"

[doktordoris]

I keep reading about a spinning beachball, but I have never seen one.

Is it a windows hourglass equivalent?

How do I make it appear? I want to see it.

 

[Gorilla Power]

Yes, it is the "wait" sign. When the system is processing something (usually large) it comes up at times. You can just Google it.

EDIT : This is how it looks like (500% zoomed for your viewing pleasure !) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WaitCursor-300p.gif

 

[doktordoris]

I thought as much.

It just amazes me that in my 3 days of mac ownership I have never seen it, I have been running oodles of applications at the same time but it never appears.

I thought it may have been done away with.

And gosh aren't mac programs tiny?
No wonder MBPs only come with tiny HDDs.

doris

 

[Patrick J]

I thought as much.

It just amazes me that in my 3 days of mac ownership I have never seen it, I have been running oodles of applications at the same time but it never appears.

You haven't owned a mac long. You will see it.

And gosh aren't mac programs tiny?
No wonder MBPs only come with tiny HDDs.

I will ignore the inflammatory comment, and instead ask a question. What mac programs are so tiny? Are they smaller than their windows equivalents?

 

[Gorilla Power]

It comes up momentarily at times when you're at the end of installing an application or loading a large YouTube video (or other Flash content on a webpage) on a slow internet connection. Ain't it pretty ? LOL !

 

[doktordoris]

You haven't owned a mac long. You will see it.



I will ignore the inflammatory comment, and instead ask a question. What mac programs are so tiny? Are they smaller than their windows equivalents?

coconut battery = 800 K

I haven't seen any PC program that small for years

Even something as useful as bento is only a smidge over 100 meg.

All the mac software I have seen strikes me as being surprisingly small.

And I didn't mean my HDD comment to sound "inflammatory", but you must admit 250g is minuscule for a HDD nowadays, even my PS3 has a TB drive in it.

doris

 

[Takashi]

I thought as much.

It just amazes me that in my 3 days of mac ownership I have never seen it, I have been running oodles of applications at the same time but it never appears.

I thought it may have been done away with.

And gosh aren't mac programs tiny?
No wonder MBPs only come with tiny HDDs.

doris

You don't usually see it UNLESS something is wrong with an application. In fact, you are not suppose to see it.

Take it as a good thing that you don't see it often.

 

[ibizarocks]

For this question you should be banned from these forums!

 

[Patrick J]

coconut battery = 800 K
I haven't seen any PC program that small for years
Even something as useful as bento is only a smidge over 100 meg.
All the mac software I have seen strikes me as being surprisingly small.

I suppose all the viruses and spyware take up room

And I didn't mean my HDD comment to sound "inflammatory", but you must admit 250g is minuscule for a HDD nowadays, even my PS3 has a TB drive in it.

doris

I apologize, I'm quite picky today. 250GB is small for today, I admit.

 

[vectus]

I suppose all the viruses and spyware take up room

I have never had a virus on my PC. Since I have been repairing PCs with viruses I have learned that only those who don't know how to use a PC get them.

 

[Sn0wball]

 

[t0mat0]

It's like your post is still loading..

 

[jawa12083]

Wirelessly posted (iPod Touch 2G 8GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

It's like your post is still loading..

DAMMIT, I wanna know what he's trying to say!

 

[elpmas]

it's the spinning beach ball of deathhhhh!

 

[solarein]

Wait a second, the beachball isn't spinning. It's a beachball with spinning rims in front!

 

[Apple-NoEscape]

Wait a second, the beachball isn't spinning. It's a beachball with spinning rims in front!

And with that the mystery or everything ever was solved.

 

[Relznuk]

And with that the mystery or everything ever was solved.

Furthermore, a new hubcap design was born... Beach ball of death custom hubcaps, anyone? Yes!

 

[Sadnap]

The apocalypse will come after the sky blue screens and the sun turns into the bbod. None but penguins escape.

 

[Raima]

coconut battery = 800 K

I haven't seen any PC program that small for years

Even something as useful as bento is only a smidge over 100 meg.

Mac programs are generally quite larger as they don't share components like Windows systems do. For example, Adobe pdf reader is something like 45mb on PC while it's something like 90mb on mac. Those figures may not be exact, but I'm pretty sure it's around twice the size on Mac.

 

[alphaod]

example, Adobe pdf reader is something like 45mb on PC while it's something like 90mb on mac.

Bad example because Preview is just kick ass; but if you're comparing Acrobat, then well they are both huge, though I think the Windows side is actually bigger.

 

[mcpryon2]

I prefer "pinwheel of death" myself, but yeah, you'll be seeing it soon enough. It's only a matter of time.