The Difference Between Your Mac’s Different Wait Cursors

Posted on October 2, 2015 by resourcefulman

Nobody likes to see a beach ball (aka spinner, aka spinning pizza, aka spinning wait cursor ) in OS X, but have you ever wondered why you see different ones from time to time? Or, when things get really weird, can you sometimes see the clock ticking? It turns out the answer has to do with the app you’re working with.

Depending on what you do in OS X, your mouse cursor can turn into a rainbow-colored spinning beach ball, a blue spinning beach ball, and, in some rare cases, a ticking clock. Each of them happens for different reasons, and knowing why can help you solve the problem:

Rainbow Beach Ball: This is the most common wait cursor you will see because it is the standard in OS X. If an application cannot process the events it receives and does not respond within 2-4 seconds, this cursor is displayed. This is usually application dependent, so you can hover over another application and it will disappear. Usually, if the application is a little overloaded and “thinks”, you will see this cursor.
Blue Beach Ball: The blue spinning cursor is sometimes also referred to as a JavaScript spinner to give an idea of how to use it. A blue beach ball is usually displayed when web content is pending . This content can be Flash, JavaScript, CSS, or whatever. You will see this not only in the browser, but also in the application using Java.
Clock: The old clock cursor has always been the most confusing to me since it was originally from versions of Apple operating systems prior to OS X. Sometimes it appears in Photoshop, but I’ve seen it elsewhere. It turns out that the most likely reason for its appearance is when the application uses an old Apple API called Carbon , which was used to port “classic” Mac applications to OS X. It also seems to appear in other applications that are not native to OS X. or that do not use the generic Cocoa API .