What Leopard Should Fix: Part One, Kill the Spinning Ball

by Hadley Stern May 22, 2006

Back three years ago I started writing a fun (at least I thought so!) series on what Panther should fix. You can read, for nostalgia’s sake, the first installment here. At that time OS X truly was a beta OS, and Panther heralded the first time that OS X was truly a usable OS. Tiger took Panther and put a whole other layer of finish and polish on the OS, helping make it not just a usable OS, but a darn good one too. Little things like labels, FontBook, and a more consistent windowing environment were all welcome in Tiger.

But Apple’s work is not done yet. And while Tiger is a fantastic day-to-day OS to work in there are still some issues. The beach ball (or spinning ball of death as some friends of mine call it) is an example of something that still appears much too much in Tiger and needs to go away.

The first time I booted up the public beta of OS X back in 2000 that ball looked so damn cool. Look, its got rainbow colors…look, it has a drop shadow! Not it is just a pain in the you-know-what. With each version of OS X we have seen less and less of the ball. But in a modern operating system like OS X I should never ever see it. The most awful spinning beach ball moment is when, like a bad omen from the past the beach ball flickers and the old-school classic OS clock appears. Have we really not moved beyond that damn clock?!

I’m sure there are reasons for the spinning beachball, but too often it gets stuck, and the promise of a multi-tasking, multi-threaded operating system is but a dream. Force-quitting applications often helps but I shouldn’t have to do that daily. Another odd thing about the spinning beachball is it seems to happen quite a lot more in the iApps (anyone else notice this) than in other, third party applications.

Either way Apple should have a target for the beachball that is acceptable. I say 3 seconds, after that something is not optimal with the user experience. I don’t care too much for the technical reasons, I just don’t want to see that damn thing!

So Apple, as you get ready to release your fourth iteration of OS X the beach ball is no longer acceptable to this user.

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Comments

  • I know what you mean, Hadley, but I don’t think I can relate to what you’re saying about the Beachball making too many appearences.  What Mac do you own?  I’ve got an iMac G5 and I don’t remember the last time I saw that beach ball.

    Thankfully, smile

    Aaron Wright had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 104

  • Hadley,
    I, too, hate the beach ball, not just because it signifies something taking too long, but because it means nothing! What ever happened to the watch cursor? I bitched to Apple about this at WWDC two years ago. The slower your machine, the more you have to stare at the beach ball. Now that I have a MBP I can’t change out the cursor (yet) because Blobber doesn’t work on intel macs and seems to have disappeared. Nothing wrong with having to wait a bit at times, but having the beach ball staring you in the face is not a good thing.

    glasspusher had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 1

  • Sorry, but three years ago OS X wasn’t a beta OS. I had been using it since the first true beta (Public Beta) through the second beta (10.0) and the third beta (10.1). But with 10.2, Apple had an OS that was rock solid and feature complete. Just because it didn’t include everything you thought it should doesn’t mean it was a “beta”.

    That said, getting rid of the “beach ball” is pretty easy. Just max out your RAM. I have 2GB on my MBP 2.16ghz, and I hardly ever see it.

    Read the factor:
    http://www.osxfactor.com/

    serpicolugnut had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 2

  • I see the beach ball most often when web surfing, either in Safari or Mozilla 1.7.13. They hit certain sites, and just can’t get past the javascript, CaptiveX or something else, so it just hangs there interminably, causing me to force-quit.

    tao51nyc had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 45

  • Jaguar was no beta OS. I used it and would have gladly stuck with it, except that more and more apps were being developed for Panther only.

    The only thing that regularly causes the SBBOD over here is Thunderbird opening up a newsgroup with tons of headers. Everything else is blissfully rare. It sounds to me like you should spend less time writing about your woes and more time fixing them.

    Aurora77 had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 35

  • I laughed so heard when I read: “I don’t care too much for the technical reasons, I just don’t want to see that damn thing!”

    That is the truth. Just tell me: “I am stuck and don’t know what to do.” So I can make a decision.

    Carmon Madison had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 1

  • Safari seems to be the worst offender - and it seems to be worst when i am running multiple java clients.  the ball spins interminably but it does eventually stop spinning so i dont have to often terminate a hung app.

    CPU Type:PowerPC G4 (1.1)
      Number Of CPUs:1
      CPU Speed:1.5 GHz
      L2 Cache (per CPU):512 KB
      Memory:1.5 GB
      Bus Speed:167 MHz
      Boot ROM Version:4.8.6f0

    sydneystephen had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 124

  • I see the beach ball often on my iMac G5 with 512MB RAM. Hate it.

    As you said:  “I don’t care too much for the technical reasons, I just don’t want to see that damn thing!”

    abiyaya had this to say on May 22, 2006 Posts: 2

  • Abiyaya, thinking about it, I did see the spinning ball on more than one occasion when I first got my iMac G5 with 512MB of RAM in it.  I upgraded it abotu three weeks after I got it to 1GB and I’ve not seen the spinning ball since.  Might I suggest you purchase some more memory?

    Aaron Wright had this to say on May 23, 2006 Posts: 104

  • “Little things like labels, FontBook, and a more consistent windowing environment were all welcome in Tiger.”

    Heh, you mean Panther, right?  (=

    Luke Mildenhall-Ward had this to say on May 23, 2006 Posts: 299

  • There are many reasons for the spinning beach ball, some that Apple can assist with and others that they can’t.

    Nutshell list of (partial) solutions:

    1. Get more RAM (this *won’t* remove it altogether)
    2. Periodically quit applications known to “leak” (use more memory over time).
    3. Make sure you have plenty of free disk space (at very least 4x your RAM).
    4. Use Activity Monitor (in Utilities) to spy on the system and applications to find culprits.
    5. Learn how to force-quit applications.
    6. Give Apple feedback on shifting the virtual memory files into their own partition.
    7. Give Apple feedback to clean up memory leaks in Safari.
    8. Give Apple feedback to offer a feature to re-open sites in Safari after a quit or crash.
    9. Unavailable networks or servers can be a another common cause.

    I’m happy to give some potted explanations to the main causes, as I know this list is too terse for non-programmers; let me if that’d be useful.

    kiwi had this to say on May 23, 2006 Posts: 1
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