That spinning rainbow beach ball that we’ve all come to love for all the wrong reasons has its own little application. It’s called Spin Control and it lets you track down the point where an application choked on its computations. Each time CoreGraphics notes an app is not responding, Spin Control takes a sample from the application and figures out what particular part of the code is running and creates a log of it.
Now before you spout off and get all “this is a developer tool” on me, I think it’s important to note that anyone who’s trying out beta software or providing comments on applications in a public forum should be giving this application some use. It lets us keep notes on crashes, and see the code that’s messing up and running at the time when that lovely beach ball appears on us. Help the developers out. If you want to test software, you need to get this. Let’s deflate those beach balls as much as possible.
For the record, Spin Control is part of the developer tools that are found in the Xcode package, which comes free on with all new computers and each version of leopard. If you’ve lost your disk you can find it on Apple’s developer network.
