What’s wrong about inventing your own cursors?  Or about using non-standard animations?  Pierre Iggot (Betalogue) expands on his previous discussion on where Adobe has gotten it wrong, when giving “wait” feedback to the user.

In short, Adobe uses a custom “waiting” cursor animation when doing certain actions (eg. Loading a large file).  Pierre discusses the Apple Guidelines on this, and how this is completely non-standard….

Betalogue » About the non-standard indeterminate wait cursor in Photoshop CS5.