zivha
17th August 2010 08:00 UTC

Unwanted Hourglass after Exec
Hello,

Here is what I am trying to do. After a certain page in the installer I need to run an EXE, which is a process that takes a long time to complete and that I want to run in parallel with the installer (i.e. this process will continue to work long after the Install is finished).

I used the Exec command to start the process knowing that it will not get the installer stuck waiting for the process to complete. In that regard it works fine, the next page shows up and the user can click on it and continue with the install process.

The problem though is that the next page cursor becomes an hourglass (or on my Vista machine a cursor with the round circle animation next to it). The cursor stays like this for a few seconds (maybe like 7 seconds or so) and then becomes normal. Although functionality is not affected this is very annoying and confusing to the user.

Any ideas?

MSG
17th August 2010 09:10 UTC

Does it become a full hourglass, or only a small hourglass next to the normal pointer? If it's the latter, it means that there is an application running in the background, so that is as designed.

zivha
17th August 2010 09:15 UTC

It is the latter, I understand it is technically correct but from user experience point of view it is confusing, the user does not understand a new process started etc, and I'd rather get rid of it.

jpderuiter
17th August 2010 09:39 UTC

You can change the cursor with:
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/SetCursor_Script_Header

zivha
17th August 2010 09:51 UTC

Tried to change it to OCR_NORMAL - it has no effect, looks the same. Just to make sure the change cursor code works I tried to change it to OCR_CROSS and it did work.