Did you get to that wiki page from the wiki for Zombo.com like I did yesterday?
Yup!
Had a feeling.
I prefer “spinner” to keep the word “throbber” far away from our codebase
On Windows we were originally calling it the whirling butthole.
Had I known about throbber, I would have immediately put that forward
A.k.a spinning wheel of death.
Aka Bad UX.
Give me progress bars all day, please.
I guess the point was to make an animated icon that shows you 2 things:
- There is some loading ongoing, be patient
- It’s not frozen, something is still going on …without the knowledge of when it might finish.
I get that some devs decide to pick it even when they could calculate when things will finish, but the whole idea is for a cursor or icon to show you that there is some background work going on in general. Sometimes you can’t actually tell in advance how long the task is going to take, e.g. waiting for a network node to respond.
Even when you could, it’s not trivial to shove a whole ass loading bar into a cursor/icon (which the linked wiki article is about).
I think some web browser actually did shove a loading bar into a cursor. It was just an outline of a circle that was filling up.
Wow! Now I can’t decide between that and the Dragon Scimitar.
“The Anus of Eternity.”
