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It the Mouse cursor too small in OSX?

cluthz

cluthz

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Earlier i didn't have a problem with finding my cursor on the display, but lately the displays are getting bigger and bigger and people are often using dual displays.

Don't apple need to give the user an opportunity to enlarge their cursor in osx 10.4?
 
You do have a point as I found myself often loosing track of the mouse arrow when trying out the 30 inch Cinema Display at the Apple store. It is easy to loose track of ones cursor at 2560X1600 especially if you have alot of palettes, Applications, and Windows Open. Information Overload is what happens and the Mouse Cursor can get lost for moments. Apple should allow for better scaling of UI in 10.4
 
Little Endian said:
You do have a point as I found myself often loosing track of the mouse arrow when trying out the 30 inch Cinema Display at the Apple store. It is easy to loose track of ones cursor at 2560X1600 especially if you have alot of palettes, Applications, and Windows Open. Information Overload is what happens and the Mouse Cursor can get lost for moments. Apple should allow for better scaling of UI in 10.4
Click to expand...

I had an idea a while ago when I first started using an Apple one button mouse for this very purpose.

You know the two grips either side that you hold the mouse by, I thought they could incorporate a sensor that when you squeezed these the cursor would pulse large and or coloured for a second to help locate it or snap back to the centre of the screen.
 
i have heard apple is implementing scalable UI elements into Tiger the same way dock scales... don't know if it's true or not, but that would be nice indeed. quartz already scales everything on the fly - it's totally resolution independent - but there just isn't a control for it.
 
JFreak said:
i have heard apple is implementing scalable UI elements into Tiger the same way dock scales... don't know if it's true or not, but that would be nice indeed. quartz already scales everything on the fly - it's totally resolution independent - but there just isn't a control for it.
Click to expand...

That would be very nice!

I must admit that i often uses a sec or two to find the cursor.
(Its probably due to dual monitors and very many apps running, I also use the keyboard as much as possible, shortcuts, etc..)

I recently checked my eyes, and I still have a perfect vision.
I can imagine that many with "decreased vision"(?) have trouble finding the cursor.
 
mpw said:
You know the two grips either side that you hold the mouse by, I thought they could incorporate a sensor that when you squeezed these the cursor would pulse large and or coloured for a second to help locate it or snap back to the centre of the screen.
Click to expand...

They used to have that for the Micorosft IntelliMouse on Windows. It would highlight the cursur in a drastic way when pressing CTRL. Pretty useful feature, actually.
 
cluthz said:
Earlier i didn't have a problem with finding my cursor on the display, but lately the displays are getting bigger and bigger and people are often using dual displays.

Don't apple need to give the user an opportunity to enlarge their cursor in osx 10.4?
Click to expand...
Why don't you try the adjustments that are available to you in the Universal Access preferences pane in System Preferences?
 
MisterMe said:
Why don't you try the adjustments that are available to you in the Universal Access preferences pane in System Preferences?
Click to expand...

As far as I'm aware is still doesn't give you a way to enlarge your cursor or find it quickly either.
 
Tiger does have the ability to resize cursor.
 

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no cursor magnification for Leopard

Checked the mighty mouse advert - says no support for Leopard.
Bummer...
REALLY need to enlarge the cursor which is tiny and easily lost on the 24" Cinema Display.
It's this sort of thing that makes me miss (GASP!) Windoze!
LongJnSilver, London
 
Leopard retains Tiger's ability to scale the cursor (see attachment).

Go to the system preferences and type 'cursor' into the search box, it'll immediately find exactly the preferences pane you want.
 

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Thomas Harte said:
Leopard retains Tiger's ability to scale the cursor (see attachment).

Go to the system preferences and type 'cursor' into the search box, it'll immediately find exactly the preferences pane you want.
Click to expand...
well, I hope the scaling is smoother, this saw teeth effect is just too 1980s. Im surprised.
 
Nope, it remains a simple bilinear scale, with the cursor's smallest size being the size at which you get a 1:1 pixel mapping. The best you can do is scale the cursor up to an integer multiple of its smallest size, to avoid sampling errors, but that's quite extreme. My quick calculation is that the 24" Cinema Display has 94.34 dots per inch. Clearly if you scale the cursor up to double size then you get the same effect as if you were viewing it on a 47.2ish dpi screen, which is a lower resolution than the original 1984 Mac.

Furthermore, it seems that no method has yet been discovered allowing third party software to alter the mouse cursor in Leopard. Furthermore, even changing the user interface scale (which is possible temporarily with the 'Quartz Debug' program provided with the developer tools) doesn't change the size of the cursor.
 
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