SDL Hourglass

[mavison]

Is there an equivalent of the RISC OS Hourglass facility in SDL?
I simply want to give the user some indication an action is being processed that can take some time.
It would have to work on OSX and, preferably on Windows also.

I have searched, and found nothing.

[RichardRussell]

Is there an equivalent of the RISC OS Hourglass facility in SDL?

Not having ever used RISC OS I don't know what its hourglass looks like or how it behaves. In BB4W and BBCSDL the only simple thing you can do is to change the mouse cursor (pointer) to the hourglass symbol - or whatever its equivalent is on the appropriate platform - using MOUSE ON 2. In principle that ought to work on all the supported desktop platforms but in my experience Mac OS seems to be an exception, and I have had to resort to using an alternative cursor (such as the 'no entry' sign, MOUSE ON 136) on that OS.

MOUSE ON n is documented in the main BB4W Help Manual and online here.

[mavison]

Thanks for that - and at last I can confim that MOUSE ON 2 seems to work fine - even on OSX Catalina.

[RichardRussell]

I can confim that MOUSE ON 2 seems to work fine - even on OSX Catalina.

That's useful to know. I'm still on High Sierra because Apple have introduced a 'feature' (putting it politely) in Mojave and Catalina that causes SDL 2.0 apps built on those platforms not to work correctly: basically they've broken the OpenGL library. Apps built on High Sierra still run perfectly well on the later OSes, so I'm sticking with it while I can.

A cynic might suggest that, since Apple have deprecated OpenGL and warned that it is unsupported going forward, they have deliberately broken it on their more recent OSes. I couldn't possibly comment, but their apparent disregard for app compatibility is in stark contrast with Windows, which goes to great lengths to keep old programs running.

If OpenGL is eventually removed from Mac OS that will be the end of BBC BASIC on that platform, because I rely on it for the GCOL plotting modes, 3D rendering and shader-based applications. Every other popular platform continues to support OpenGL, including iOS (even if not the preferred back end), but Apple are a law unto themselves.