Spinning pinwheel

The spinning pinwheel is a type of progress indicator and a variation of the mouse pointer used in Apple's macOS to indicate that an application is busy.

Officially, the macOS Human Interface Guidelines refer to it as the spinning wait cursor, but it is also known by other names. These include, but are not limited to, the spinning beach ball, the spinning wheel of death, and the spinning beach ball of death.

A wristwatch was used as the first wait cursor in early versions of the classic Mac OS. Apple's HyperCard first popularized animated cursors, including a black-and-white spinning quartered circle resembling a beach ball. The beach-ball cursor was also adopted to indicate running script code in the HyperTalk-like AppleScript. The cursors could be advanced by repeated HyperTalk invocations of "set cursor to busy".

Wait cursors are activated by applications performing lengthy operations. Some versions of the Apple Installer used an animated "counting hand" cursor. Other applications provided their own theme-appropriate custom cursors, such as a revolving Yin Yang symbol, Fetch's running dog, Retrospect's spinning tape, and Pro Tools' tapping fingers. Apple provided the standard interfaces for animating cursors: originally the Cursor Utilities (SpinCursor, RotateCursor) and, in Mac OS 8 and later, the Appearance Manager (SetAnimatedThemeCursor).

NeXTStep 1.0 used a monochrome icon resembling a spinning magneto-optical disk. Some NeXT computers included an optical drive, which was often slower than a magnetic hard drive. This made it a common reason for the wait cursor to appear.

When color support was added in NeXTStep 2.0, color versions of all icons were added. The wait cursor was updated to reflect the bright rainbow surface of these removable disks, and that icon remained, even when later machines began using hard disk drives as primary storage. Contemporary CD-ROM drives were even slower (at 1x, 150 kbit/s).

With the arrival of Mac OS X, the wait cursor was often called the "spinning beach ball" in the press, presumably by authors not knowing its NeXT history or relating it to the HyperCard wait cursor.

The two-dimensional appearance was kept essentially unchanged from NeXT to Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server 1.0 which otherwise had a user interface design resembling Mac OS 8/Platinum theme. This continued through Mac OS X 10.0/Cheetah and Mac OS X 10.1/Puma, which introduced the Aqua user interface theme.