Common Mac OS X Cursors | Hacker News Reader

Common Mac OS X Cursors

tobiasahlin.com

31 pointscorentin8834 comments

I clicked through hoping to find the spinning beachball as the most common one, but in this age of Apple Silicon that seems to have stopped being a thing.

That said, this is a useful UX design tidbit.

> I clicked through hoping to find the spinning beachball as the most common one, but in this age of Apple Silicon that seems to have stopped being a thing.

Apple Silicon is so fast, the beachball is no longer needed. /s

No sarcasm needed. My first Mac is an M1, and I've only seen the beachball when badly-behaved programs crash, never for waiting for something.

As a non-mac user I originally didn't even know the beachball was indicating "waiting" and not actually "it crashed". Just from my coworkers grumbling.

In the age of hard disks it could be hard to tell.

It makes more sense that it's 'waiting for access' when you know it was historically supposed to represent a spinning CD.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/pointers-in-macos-m...

Here's a more comprehensive list.

I'm sure they were custom (app specific) cursors, but I kind of miss the counting-finger-hand cursor that meant "busy".

Is distributing these cursors OK legally speaking? I guess as part of a screenshot it's probably fair use.

not a lawyer, but I don't see how it would be. that being said, it's the type of offense that is unlikely to get you in trouble

The History of Mouse Cursors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg

This is a bit off-topic, but I have always been wondering why cursors in operating systems or games always seem to wear white gloves. Am I just too young? Have gloves been a thing in the eighties?

Edit: Thinking further, is this related to Mickey Mouse? Why does he wear gloves too, anyway? So many questions.

I would assume that the reason mickey mouse wears gloves is to make his hand movements more clear, since his body is pitch black

There are at least three reasons Mickey wears gloves:

   1. To make his hands stand out. [1]
   2. To make him seem more human. [1] [2]
   3. To make it easier to draw him (gloves are simpler than hands). [2]

   1. https://www.southernliving.com/news/why-disney-cartoons-wear-gloves
   2. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1495,00.html

URLs won't be link-ified if they're in a code block.

https://www.southernliving.com/news/why-disney-cartoons-wear... https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-14...

Thanks! How did you get those to present as separate lines, without putting a blank line between them?

I didn't. I meant to put a blank line between them so they would be in different paragraphs, but it only wraps to a second line on small screens. On the desktop they show on one line.

There may be something visually off-putting about the sight of a disembodied hand floating across a computer screen.

The glove also prevents the need for a multi-ethnic skin tone package that likely would have picked up steam around the year 2017.

Do they? Apple's seem to be the only common ones obviously wearing gloves. Windows' cursors as well as most of the common cursor sets on Linux just use a hand shape with no glove details. I assume this comes from Apple's skeumorphic phase where they may have felt the abstract 'white hand' was not good enough as a metaphor; it goes back at least as far as classic MacOS IIRC.

Not using lifelike colouring has hopefully obvious reasons: inclusivity, contrast, display compatibility

You want an image that is visible on top of all kinds of backgrounds, including full white and full black ones.

Historically, you have 16×16 monochrome pixels to do it.

Now, draw a recognizable arrow or a hand under those limitations.

Are these the current MacOS cursors? Or historical Mac OS X cursors?

Current. E.g. the camera cursor is used by the screenshot tool (cmd-shift-4, then space)

It’s interesting that people don’t associate the X in Mac OS X with “10”.

MacOS is now on version 13*, so calling it Mac OS X is like saying “the current version of Windows 7”

Edit: whoops, Ventura is version 13. Thanks!

Ventura is macOS 13.

That'll happen if you keep using the same version number for two decades ;) .

Ventura is latest version of MacOS and that's version 13.

Whoops, thanks!

     Mac OS died with Mac OS 9. 

     Next came Mac OS X 10.x. 

     Then OS X 10.x. 

     Today it is macOS.

     MacOS never existed.

Yes and it's never the iPhone, just iPhone. But I don't care and don't work for Apple PR.

I don't think that's a good analogy. Most of us called "OS X" for two decades. Apple might have changed the official name to macOS (or whatever) but no one I know really followed suit.

You may live in a bubble :)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-02-10%202...

Weird that they are @x1 @x2 and @x4 as the apple devices scales were historically 1, 2 and 3

wasn't it x4, scaled down to 3×? I recall they used something like that in first "plus" phones.

No, it was x3. The physical displays on the early “plus” phones were slightly smaller than the actual rendered resolution, so that was downscaled slightly.

This is about their desktop/laptop OS, not their phones/tablets.

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