90s Cursor Effects | Hacker News Reader

90s Cursor Effects

github.com

60 pointsplurby24 comments

"To be added (Please, go ahead!) [...] Cursor Trail"

This was an OS feature (and still is, at least on Win7), rather than a cheesy webpage effect. The browser was never allowed to know what the cursor looks like, so it's impossible for webpages to implement a native-looking mouse trail that works consistently.

The OS mouse trail was super useful on LCD screens with sluggish pixels: without it, the cursor would be essentially invisible if you moved the mouse too fast. Couldn't use my NEC Ready 120LT without this feature!

> The OS mouse trail was super useful on LCD screens with sluggish pixels: without it, the cursor would be essentially invisible if you moved the mouse too fast.

It's also (still) super useful for visually impaired users.

I've also found it very useful to bend VmWare Fusion to my will -- between Windows in the guest, VmWare and the OSX host (with high-res / Retina screens), the cursor is often "off" relative to the actual pointer... until I enable the trail in Windows, at which point everything works properly. I have no idea why.

Most cursor glitches end up being a mismatch between hardware-drawn cursors and software-rendered. Turning the trails on forces Windows to draw the cursor in software, which puts the cursor much earlier in the graphics pipeline and makes it much more accessible to other things like f.lux or apparently Fusion's integration.

I have fond memories of the "Elastic Bullets" trail (all the cool kids had it on their websites).

Most of my early javascript snippets came from javascript.internet.com [1], but I found a copy on yaldex [2]. More classics available there and javascript-fx.com [3]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20000619201149/http://javascript....

[2] http://www.yaldex.com/FSMessages/ElasticBullets.htm

[3] http://javascript-fx.com/mouse_trail/index.html

Came here to post this, and was glad to see it already :)

Here's a page that has them a little more like I remember: http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/scripts/elasticballs.htm...

How is yaldex.com and javascript-fx.com still running? Are the folks who created them still around and paying for the host and domain?

Suggestion: search through the Geocity, Tripod, ... archives that survived and use Archive.org

About mouse cursors and effects: Windows 95 Plus CD contained many desktop themes incl various themed cursor, background wallpapers, animated screensaver. Wonderful for its time.

This brought back memories from old times: I can remember copying some Javascript code to a forum I used to manage to get snow flakes to fall on the screen (during christmas). I loved the effect!

I know this is probably a losing battle, but I have to try: The cursor is the text insertion point. The thing that moves when you move the mouse and is arrow-shaped by default is correctly called the pointer.

The name of the thing is whatever people refer to it as.

The publication record shows that "mouse cursor" is completely acceptable. For examples from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22mouse+cursor%22 :

Smalltalk-72 manual (1976), page 2 - http://mame.myds.me/bitsavers/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/Sma... :

> The Mouse: The little rectangular object with three buttons that usually sits to the right of the keyboard is called a mouse. Move it around while watching the screen. An arrow (mouse cursor) will be moving in response to it. This is how we point to objects on the screen.

Raster Graphics for Interactive Programming Environments (1979) - http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xer...

> Graphical input. The user is provided with a "mouse," a coordinate input device with three pushbuttons. The mouse rolls along a table top and is tracked by a cursor that moves on the screen. The mouse can thus be used to point to objects already displayed on the screen, or simply to identify a coordinate position.

The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal ("Sometime in 1983", by Rob Pike) - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.611...

> The state of mouse input is reflected by the cursor tracked by the mouse as it is moved. Usually, the cursor is an arrow pointing to the pixel at the mouse’s location. A program may change the cursor to reflect its state.

A Study in Interactive 3-D Rotation Using 2-D Control Devices" (1990) - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/asellen/public...

> If the mouse button is depressed while the mouse cursor is inside the circle, left-and-right and up-and-down movement of the mouse will rotate the object left-and right and up-and-down on the screen.

Fluid DTMouse: Better Mouse Support for Touch-Based Interactions (2006) - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.416...

> For example, once you have moved the mouse cursor over a small target that is to be dragged, you do not want the act of switching to mouse dragging mode to move the cursor off of the target .

And both used interchangeably in this collection of draft Mac documentation from the early 80s (it is labeled 'Inside Macintosh Vol 1' but isn't really) https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applemacIn84_27699101:

Cursors

A cursor is a small image that appears on the screen and is controlled by the mouse. (It appears only on the screen, and never in an off-screen bit image.) Other Macintosh documentation calls this image a "pointer", since it points to a location on the screen. To avoid confusion with other meanings of "pointer" in this manual and other Toolbox documentation, we use the alternate term "cursor".

In emacs the text insertion point is, well, the point. The visual indicator of the point's position is called the cursor.

Those were faster in the late 90s. How is it so slow?

My guesses: OOP-style JS and translate3D CSS for moving the objects around.

How did it work back then? A transparent canvas overlay? CSS element position changes?

> A transparent canvas overlay

Yes. Using the DOM for a lot of individual spans totally kills this.

I remember one particularly annoying one from that era was an analogue clock that used to surround the mouse pointer. I wonder if that still exists anywhere.

Saw this in the issues? https://github.com/tholman/90s-cursor-effects/issues/2#issue...

That's the one! Ah, memories. It seems weird when not combined with a GeoCities logo.

gads, I remember making one of those.

This reminds me of cleaning the Comet Cursor[1] adware, which did this (and other random and obnoxious effects), off of people's PCs back in the early 2000s. IIRC, it was bundled with Real Player and usually accompanied with Gator...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor

I got really excited when I saw the title, thinking this would be like my old VT100 days or something. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com