A Program Is Stuck
When you’re working away on your MacBook Air, you may suddenly find that it’s unresponsive and you’re faced with the dreaded spinning wait cursor that just won’t stop or go away.
It’s possible that your program is stuck, but that’s not guaranteed.
The program could just be really busy. Sometimes program operations take an inordinately long time. Recalculating a large spreadsheet, compiling a program, or rendering a 3-D object can take minutes. Therefore, your first resort should be to wait for a while to see if the program works itself out of its trance.
Your Mac may be low on memory. This can cause a program to seem stuck, when in fact it’s really just trying to struggle through on limited resources. Try shutting down some of your other programs to free up some RAM.
If none of this works, you have no choice but to force the program to quit. The easiest way to do this is to right-click the program’s Dock icon, hold down the Option key, and then click Force Quit. If that doesn’t work, follow these steps instead:
1. Pull down the Apple menu and choose Force Quit. You can also press Option+
+Esc. You see the Force Quit Applications window shown in Figure 12.5. You can ...
Get MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
