From: Tanja Date: 10:37 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: beachball Today I witnessed, many times, that cute colourful beachball that my Mac OS X displays when it basically hangs. Instead of using the valuable resources to actually make sure Safari doesn't hang (as my activity monitor kindly displays in bright red) Apple decided to make a cute spinning beachball. I don't like it *I hate it* What do they think? I go 'oh cute, I don't mind the wait lalala'??? I want to do my work! I don't want some stupid happy thingy on my screen, making it impossible for me to actually do anything but wait! And what do I wait for? I have no clue! It spins on *ALL* my apps most of the time! Do I want it? No! Can I turn it off? NO! Does it drive me crazy? Fuck yeah! -- Tanja ... Be a rebel. Accept your body.
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 10:47 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Tanja wrote: [...] > I want to do my work! I don't want some stupid happy thingy on my > screen, making it impossible for me to actually do anything but wait! [...] I hate that thing too. These days there is no reason to lock the entire computer while you're opening one application. If I could do something on a terminal in the meantime I'd be less pissed off when Safari is slow to load. Of course, when I start seeing the beachball for Safari, I know it is time to reboot. What I hate far more than seeing the beachball for Safari is the beachball I see without fail whenever my laptop comes out of sleep. I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt. But can I type in my password? No, I have to wait for the damn beachball to stop spinning. It takes at least half a minute. And why? Surely graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:51 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > I hate that thing too. These days there is no reason to lock the > entire computer while you're opening one application. Say what? I routinely switch to the terminal and do stuff there while applications are bobbing in the dock loading, or are otherwise beachball-happy. If you can't do that, something else is wrong. I've had one of the XServes at work do that to me a lot, when it was memory-starved and paging its guts out. But I've never had it happen just because one application was busy, hung, or dead. > I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt. But > can I type in my password? No, I have to wait for the damn beachball > to stop spinning. It takes at least half a minute. And why? Surely > graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input. My off-the-top-of-my-head guess is LoginWindow is blocked on disk I/O and your disk is still spinning up. Insert hate about Adobe not putting server-side UI scripting into Display Postscript, so NeXT couldn't use that to implement UI elements like Sun did with NeWS. Because if they had, then Apple would have pretty much had to duplicate that in OS X, and they'd be able to move some of that to the GPU in Quartz Extreme. We'd have OpenGL Postscript instead of Dashboard. I hate missed opportunities like that.
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 13:00 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > > I hate that thing too. These days there is no reason to lock the > > entire computer while you're opening one application. > > Say what? > > I routinely switch to the terminal and do stuff there while applications > are bobbing in the dock loading, or are otherwise beachball-happy. > > If you can't do that, something else is wrong. I've had one of the > XServes at work do that to me a lot, when it was memory-starved and > paging its guts out. But I've never had it happen just because one > application was busy, hung, or dead. My experience is that I cannot minimise Safari while it is in beachball mode. It eventually minimises once it gets out of beachball mode; I guess it queues minimising instead of treating it as an interrupt. And the last time I tried to bring something else to the forefront using the dock, Safari crashed. > > I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt. But > > can I type in my password? No, I have to wait for the damn beachball > > to stop spinning. It takes at least half a minute. And why? Surely > > graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input. > My off-the-top-of-my-head guess is LoginWindow is blocked on disk I/O > and your disk is still spinning up. Just take a long time to validate my password then, but let me enter it. Of course, what I hate most about my mac is that I cannot opt for mouse-focus. I despise click-focus and focus-to-forefront.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 20:33 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 05:00:20AM -0700, Ann Barcomb wrote: > Of course, what I hate most about my mac is that I cannot opt for > mouse-focus. I despise click-focus and focus-to-forefront. I mentioned this in another thread but its worth repeating. FFM in Terminal.app default write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES and restart Terminal.app http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031029203936659 FFM in X11 defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true and restart X11 The hate here is that Apple hides these features rather than make them available through normal preference menus which are instead filled with such critical items like how transparent you want your terminal windows to be. And that if you want FFM for all apps you have to buy something like CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro for $40. http://www.codetek.com/ctvd/
From: Chris Devers Date: 21:14 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Michael G Schwern wrote: > I mentioned this in another thread but its worth repeating. > > FFM in Terminal.app > default write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES > and restart Terminal.app > http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031029203936659 > > FFM in X11 > defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true > and restart X11 > > The hate here is that Apple hides these features rather than make them > available through normal preference menus which are instead filled with such > critical items like how transparent you want your terminal windows to be. While it is, admittedly, hateful to require third party software to do something easily in a GUI that had previously been hidden [in plain sight?] in some obscure `defaults write` incantation, the original problem is, itself, much more hateful. Hence the appeal of TinkerTool: <http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html>; It doesn't provide a way to do this in X11 or the overall system, but the Application setting for "Auto-activate windows by mouse cursor" in Terminal seems to be the GUI equivalent of what you have above. ( So that's a start. Additionally, TinkerTool provides GUI ways to change all kinds of system parameters -- hide the dock behind the top menu bar! allow the Finder to quit! change the Finder's umask behavior for new files! turn on the extremely useful Debug menu in Safari! -- all in one place. Truly, Marcel Bresink has seen the Hate, and has not backed down. If past is prelude, a new version of TinkerTool will be available soon after Tiger is released, so that the things you hate in it may already have remedies.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 22:01 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > And that if you want FFM for all apps you have to buy something like > CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro for $40. > http://www.codetek.com/ctvd/ And I tried that, just to see, and decided that Apple would need to make some significant user interface changes to make that style workable. Or someone would need to do some pretty amazing hacks. Maybe Codetek has done that by now, but FFM plus raise-on-focus plus a detached menu bar and panels that disappear when you lose focus... no... I don't think so. X11 and Terminal are kind of special cases, and having point-to-focus just for them is kind of OK, but I still found it disconcerting to have some apps tracking the mouse and some not.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:08 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 04:01:39PM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > > And that if you want FFM for all apps you have to buy something like > > CodeTek Virtual Desktop Pro for $40. > > http://www.codetek.com/ctvd/ > > And I tried that, just to see, and decided that Apple would need to make > some significant user interface changes to make that style workable. Or > someone would need to do some pretty amazing hacks. Maybe Codetek has done > that by now, but FFM plus raise-on-focus plus a detached menu bar and panels > that disappear when you lose focus... no... I don't think so. Yes, I remember using something called "Sloop" in the OS 8 days which did FFM but with raise-on-focus with the additional problem that it raised not just one window but all windows of that application. A MacOS Classic UI issue. New version of Codetek sez it has focus without raise.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 10:35 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > And I tried that, just to see, and decided that Apple would need to make > some significant user interface changes to make that style workable. Or > someone would need to do some pretty amazing hacks. Maybe Codetek has done > that by now, but FFM plus raise-on-focus plus a detached menu bar and panels > that disappear when you lose focus... no... I don't think so. BeOS had full support for FFM in the GUI, and it was pretty interesting watching the development of GUI FFM over time. It got to the point where it seldom confused me or pissed me off, I think... I use quite a few popup tools on my mac, like Quicksilver and BluePhoneElite, and none of those work with Codetek's FFM, because the windows never have true focus (apparently) and thus appear briefly, realize they don't have focus, and disappear immediately. > X11 and Terminal are kind of special cases, and having point-to-focus just > for them is kind of OK, but I still found it disconcerting to have some > apps tracking the mouse and some not. Yeah, it definitely needs to be throughout the whole system, and I'm convinced it needs full support throughout the OS to not be confusing as all hell. Autoraise is evil, just for the record.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:01 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > BeOS had full support for FFM in the GUI, and it was pretty interesting > watching the development of GUI FFM over time. It got to the point where > it seldom confused me or pissed me off, I think... BeOS didn't _design_ their UI _around_ click-to-focus. They don't have floating panels that vanish when focus leaves their parent window, a floating menu bar that changes when the focus changes, and so on. There's 20 years of design around a different focus model you'd have to unwind or work around to make point-to-focus work in OS X.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 12:07 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > BeOS didn't _design_ their UI _around_ click-to-focus. They don't > have floating panels that vanish when focus leaves their parent > window, a floating menu bar that changes when the focus changes, > and so on. There's 20 years of design around a different focus > model you'd have to unwind or work around to make point-to-focus > work in OS X. Yep, I'm aware of that. Strangely, that awareness has not reduced my hate considerably.
From: David Champion Date: 21:31 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball * On 2005.04.26, in <20050426045250.K5801@xxxxx.xxxxxxx.xxx>, * "Ann Barcomb" <ann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > My experience is that I cannot minimise Safari while it is in beachball > mode. It eventually minimises once it gets out of beachball mode; I > guess it queues minimising instead of treating it as an interrupt. That's also the fault of the application-controls-UI hatrocity. You can't minimize it because Safari is responsible for responding to the minimize event and minimizing itself. But you can open-apple-tab into Terminal, because the open-apple-tab goes straight into the WindowServer. (Hey, where did my closed-apple go? Not that I miss the bloody thing, but does this imply that the distinction was meaningless all along? Is that... *gasp* an admission of error?) > And the last time I tried to bring something else to the forefront > using the dock, Safari crashed. Petulance. > Of course, what I hate most about my mac is that I cannot opt for > mouse-focus. I despise click-focus and focus-to-forefront. Yes, but you're wrong. Hear Mr. Jobs. Mr. Jobs is wiser than you. Or me. Speaking of this hate, I've done the terminal FFM thing (though I found it while perusing the plist and changed it manually -- such gems you find that way). But it's still monstrously hateful. If some horrible, stupid application is running, like, say, Stuffit Expander or Bluetooth File Exchange -- one of those transient bastards that performs its task and closes its window, but remains running in the foreground with its own menubar -- and you press open-apple-q to quit it, what happens? The bastard application doesn't close, no, because Terminal has detected that your mouse is indicating its wish to focus on Terminal. So Terminal steals the event, despite the UI precedence of the bastard application, and Terminal quits instead. Lovely. The many foothills of hate along this wilderness road are deep and creviced. The bandits jump out at you without warning, and when they do, that's all she wrote. You're lying along a wildnerness road in deep and creviced foothills, wondering where the hell *that* came from. The blazing indifference of the sun rains down. Your breath evaporates before you exhale.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:13 on 27 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > or Bluetooth File Exchange -- one of those transient bastards that > performs its task and closes its window, but remains running in the > foreground with its own menubar -- and you press open-apple-q to quit > it, what happens? The bastard application doesn't close, no, because > Terminal has detected that your mouse is indicating its wish to focus on > Terminal. So Terminal steals the event, despite the UI precedence of > the bastard application, and Terminal quits instead. AUGH I hadn't noticed that in the brief period that I played with focus policy on the Mac. I can see two reasonable ways that Terminal could implement FFM. It could let the OS manage focus unless it was the foreground application, and when it was it could take over. Or it could make its window come to the foreground when the pointer came into its domain, in which case the app's menu bar would have gone back to Terminal's. This third option seems to be the worst of all worlds... what was Apple thinking of?
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 10:51 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Window Focus (was Re: beachball) On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > AUGH > > I hadn't noticed that in the brief period that I played with focus policy > on the Mac. I can see two reasonable ways that Terminal could implement > FFM. It could let the OS manage focus unless it was the foreground > application, and when it was it could take over. Or it could make its > window come to the foreground when the pointer came into its domain, in > which case the app's menu bar would have gone back to Terminal's. > > This third option seems to be the worst of all worlds... what was Apple > thinking of? Codetek seems to be completely random in its focus, and I'm often just surprised as hell at how my computer behaves. I flip workspaces, hit a key combo, and, um, wonder what the hell is going on. OS X apps are great with this: I'm using iChat, I flip to my Safari's workspace and hit Command-T (to open a new tab), which instead opens the Font window. Oh crap, I don't want that, so I hit Command-W to close the window, except the font window isn't a real window, so instead you just closed the chat window. Hey, thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. This is definitely one of the things keeping me from switching to a mac for my main desktop.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 11:07 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: Window Focus (was Re: beachball) Oh, and one more bad thing about window focus on OS X: The stupid metallic interface doesn't change its look when it loses focus. You can only tell if it has focus by looking at the window control buttons or the boldness of the text. That's just brain-dead.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:03 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: Window Focus (was Re: beachball) > The stupid metallic interface doesn't change its look when it loses focus. > You can only tell if it has focus by looking at the window control buttons > or the boldness of the text. That's just brain-dead. Hmmm. I wonder if the new ugly-toolbar design in Tiger has the same problem.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 12:08 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: Window Focus (was Re: beachball) On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Peter da Silva wrote: > Hmmm. > > I wonder if the new ugly-toolbar design in Tiger has the same problem. Dunno, but I'm willing to make a bet based on Apple's recent results in the usability/lickability design spectrum.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 14:18 on 27 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > My experience is that I cannot minimise Safari while it is in beachball > mode. No, you can't. Minimizing is done by the framework running in the application context. But you can hide it, and in any case even if you couldn't having a beachballed Safari window in the background isn't what I'd call "locking the entire computer". I've had the entire computer lock up on me a few times, when it was very busy and very memory starved, but when that happens it doesn't always even get a chance to beachball me. That's a very different ting from having an application lock up. > And the last time I tried to bring something else to the forefront > using the dock, Safari crashed. Hmm. Then something else is very very wrong. Safari shouldn't even be able to know that you're doing that. > > > I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt. But > > > can I type in my password? No, I have to wait for the damn beachball > > > to stop spinning. It takes at least half a minute. And why? Surely > > > graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input. > > My off-the-top-of-my-head guess is LoginWindow is blocked on disk I/O > > and your disk is still spinning up. > Just take a long time to validate my password then, but let me enter > it. Whether it can do that or not may not be under its control, if that disk I/O is a page fault.
From: Aaron Crane
Date: 11:12 on 28 Apr 2005
Subject: Re: beachball
Ann Barcomb writes:
> Of course, what I hate most about my mac is that I cannot opt for
> mouse-focus. I despise click-focus and focus-to-forefront.
"... click to type, the interface for people who have to prod you
before they can talk to you ..."
-- Tim Bradshaw, http://xrl.us/clicktotype
From: Tanja Date: 15:19 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Apr 26, 2005, at 11:47, Ann Barcomb chatted the following lines: > On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Tanja wrote: > > [...] >> I want to do my work! I don't want some stupid happy thingy on my >> screen, making it impossible for me to actually do anything but wait! > [...] > > I hate that thing too. These days there is no reason to lock the > entire computer while you're opening one application. If I could do > something on a terminal in the meantime I'd be less pissed off when > Safari is slow to load. Of course, when I start seeing the beachball > for Safari, I know it is time to reboot. Ah yes that usually works. What's very hateful today is that it started right after a reboot, so no, I'm not going to reboot (yet) > What I hate far more than seeing the beachball for Safari is the > beachball I see without fail whenever my laptop comes out of sleep. > I open the top and the display instantly shows the login prompt. But > can I type in my password? No, I have to wait for the damn beachball > to stop spinning. It takes at least half a minute. And why? Surely > graphics must be more complex than accepting keyboard input. Oooh, I get that one a lot on my ibook. It annoys me even more that I sometimes wait and it goes right back to sleep cause I didn't press anything. Shaking it didn't help. -- Tanja ... Women, you can't live with them, and yet they're everywhere.
From: Juerd Date: 10:51 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball Tanja skribis 2005-04-26 11:37 (+0200): > Today I witnessed, many times, that cute colourful beachball that my > Mac OS X displays when it basically hangs. I hate it too. But the beachball doesn't always lock up my entire Mac mini (which is hatefully spelled with a lower case m for mini). Most of the time it just happifies the current application (yes, Safari) including the global menu bar. The [apple symbol] menu is in that same global menu bar, and thus unclickable because a beachball doesn't want to be used for clicking. So I focus another application, the beachball turns into an arrow pointer again, and hey, look at that, I can access the [apple symbol] menu and Force quit Safari. Hurrah for logic! Juerd
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:42 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > But the beachball doesn't always lock up my entire Mac mini (which is > hatefully spelled with a lower case m for mini). Most of the time it > just happifies the current application (yes, Safari) including the > global menu bar. That's because the menu bar is not global, it exists separately in each application. Which is hateful. Mac OS X's user interface uses the Windows-style "the application context handles ALL the user interface related to the application" design, instead of the X11-style "the application context handles everything inside the window border, the window manager takes care of everything outside that" design. You know what the beachball means, right? There's a timer at a very low level in the user interface code. The application can change the value, but it doesn't handle it. When the application hasn't responded to any messages from the user interface (the WindowServer I believe) in that time, it puts up the beachball to let the use know the application is hung. You can think of it as a "hate target". It helpfully points out which application you should be hating.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:15 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > Instead of using the valuable resources to actually make sure Safari > doesn't hang (as my activity monitor kindly displays in bright red) > Apple decided to make a cute spinning beachball. Since the typical GPU can spin the beachball with 3 pipelines tied behind its back, and they had it as far back at the first version on NeXT on a 68020, you might as well begrudge the CPU cycles they waste making the dock around said activity monitor transparent. Speaking of which, I hate how clicking on the activity monitor's dock icon doesn't open the activity monitor. I guess human interface guidelines are for OTHER people.
From: Darrell Fuhriman Date: 22:16 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball > New version of Codetek sez it has focus without raise. I use it without having windows raised. It's not perfect, in general, but it seems to work pretty well. Darrell
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 10:37 on 28 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: beachball On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Darrell Fuhriman wrote: > I use it without having windows raised. It's not perfect, in > general, but it seems to work pretty well. Even without the Quicksilver incompatibility, I never quite got used to Codetek's FFM, because of the click-to-raise, which always just confuses me.
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