Thread: Who decided the waiting 'hour-glass' icon should cease to be animated?

I'm an old-school user of PC's and I fondly remember the hour-glass icon used to flip and have sand pouring. It gave me something to watch but also told me that the computer had not frozen. About 5 years ago I suddenly realised that the icon had become static even though computers had become far more powerful , so it could not be a memory issue.

Was there an international 'hour-glass' conference I missed on the news? Or did Microsoft just stop doing it and everyone else followed on?

I miss my little friend

Originally Posted by Citadel

I'm an old-school user of PC's and I fondly remember the hour-glass icon used to flip and have sand pouring. It gave me something to watch but also told me that the computer had not frozen. About 5 years ago I suddenly realised that the icon had become static even though computers had become far more powerful , so it could not be a memory issue.

Was there an international 'hour-glass' conference I missed on the news? Or did Microsoft just stop doing it and everyone else followed on?

I miss my little friend

Beyond a doubt, most all of us miss some little friend or another, be they from childhood, brothel, (oops!), family,......The "Information Revolution" has introduced concepts not even imagined when I was a kid! Most unfortunately of all, anonymity was then, still, a very real and appreciated state. jocular

An asshole, that's who.

Lol ^^ woah! Well, I guess my lone voice will be unpopular here but I hated the animated hour glass! If I told you my reason, you would laugh at me so I will spare us all that bit of entertainment and just say--Glad it's gone!

Originally Posted by wegs

Lol ^^ woah! Well, I guess my lone voice will be unpopular here but I hated the animated hour glass! If I told you my reason, you would laugh at me so I will spare us all that bit of entertainment and just say--Glad it's gone!

tell us please

The use of spinners is better than an animated hourglass.
They better convey which software process is busy.
The general adoption of asynchronous processes makes the old hourglass misleading at best.

Spinners are also far better suited for browser-based software.
Imagine if every time a YouTube video was buffering you had the hourglass symbol. Your ability to click on a different link would be handicapped by the spinning mouse pointer.
But - you might suggest - why not only have the hourglass symbol when you are over the video box? But that would mean that if your mouse was not over the video box then you couldn't tell the the video was buffering.

Spinning hourglasses are from a time when synchronous processes prevented you from doing anything else.

Gotta say, my new i7 Ivy Bridge is so fast in conjunction with a SSD that I don't even have time to miss a loading icon when I open a program. Maybe the hourglass isn't what we've lost; maybe we lost the loading time. If that's the case, I will happily wave goodbye to it.

Possibly something to do with Thin Clients and their use on PC's or Terminals.

I remember Netscape (and early IE) had a revolving world image at the top right. This was a real pain for thin clients as the server only sent the things that changed on screen to the client and animated icons and the like had to be blanked out or they would totally defeat the original purpose and massively increase the bandwidth and server processing required.

Thin client - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gotta say, my new i7 Ivy Bridge is so fast in conjunction with a SSD that I don't even have time to miss a loading icon when I open a program. Maybe the hourglass isn't what we've lost; maybe we lost the loading time. If that's the case, I will happily wave goodbye to it.

My own feeling is that the hourglass sand thingie belongs to the days when waiting for many things to load was a bit like The Little Engine That Could, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I ... " Now, it's a bit of a surprise when things are that slow. (Though for some videos you do need the spinner to see how things are going.)

Originally Posted by adelady

Gotta say, my new i7 Ivy Bridge is so fast in conjunction with a SSD that I don't even have time to miss a loading icon when I open a program. Maybe the hourglass isn't what we've lost; maybe we lost the loading time. If that's the case, I will happily wave goodbye to it.

My own feeling is that the hourglass sand thingie belongs to the days when waiting for many things to load was a bit like The Little Engine That Could, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I ... " Now, it's a bit of a surprise when things are that slow. (Though for some videos you do need the spinner to see how things are going.)

Maybe the hourglass is going the way of the dial-up cchhhhrrrr ping ping rrrrrreeeeeeee pong ccchrhrxxxxx

Reminds me of the quote from The IT Crowd, they're talking about having to use dial-up when the broad-band is down:

"Roy: Oh, do you remember the internet at this speed? Up all night and you’d see eight women.”

Originally Posted by PhDemon

"Roy: Oh, do you remember the internet at this speed? Up all night and you’d see eight women.”

The only way I would have seen 8 women is if they looked like this:

Originally Posted by Weterman

Originally Posted by wegs

Lol ^^ woah! Well, I guess my lone voice will be unpopular here but I hated the animated hour glass! If I told you my reason, you would laugh at me so I will spare us all that bit of entertainment and just say--Glad it's gone!

tell us please

Very well, then. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. It's a long story.