macOS Cursors
mac-cursors.netlify.app
mac-cursors.netlify.app
Final Cut Pro, Apple’s flagship video editing software, overrides the default MacOS cursor with a nearly identical, but slightly different cursor shape. It’s almost exactly the same as the standard retina MacOS cursor but the little “stem” at the bottom is shorter & points slightly more to the right. I’d expect this from a weird niche bit of open source software, but for one of the Mac’s flagship applications it’s a bit strange. Perhaps someone here could enlighten me to the purpose of this bizarre quirk.
Years ago I was hosting a movie night and we were watching a dark, stylish black & white film that required subtitles. This was either in iTunes or TV.app, whichever was Apple's flagship movie watching app at the time. Every time a subtitle appeared on the screen, the gamma (or something affecting brightness) would change ever so slightly, affecting the whole scene in a barely perceptible way. It drove me nuts. This wasn't some kind of adaptive dimming from the screen; I confirmed that the actual image (even when watching just on the laptop screen) was changing.
After some searching, a really wacky solution popped up: if you go into the Accessibility settings and bump up the size of the cursor ever so slightly, it'll fix it.
Supposedly, the reason was that macOS's cursor drawing is heavily optimized (potentially in the firmware?) and thus uses a different drawing path (maybe with GPU acceleration vs. without?) depending on whether the default cursor is being used or not. So, whatever drawing routine was used to render subtitles causing the gamma to shift was also triggered by having a different default cursor, making it the same whether or not subtitles were on the screen.
Even though I found a fix, to this today I'm still furious that Apple – supposedly known for their quality, attention to detail, and good multimedia experience – could overlook this in their flagship app. And now it's something I always do when setting up a new Mac: bump the cursor size.
I guess one other thing you could say is, I don't know if it's just me in my head, but I always feel that the cursor movement in MacOS is silky smooth.
The good news is that Intel GPUs are not used anymore on recent Macs, the bad news is that Intel GPUs drivers will never be fixed.
Probably the enlarged cursor prevents the usage of the optimized Windows Server mode.
It's maybe strange that compositing HDR + SDR together results in SDR rather than HDR, of course. You might consider that to be the bug.
But I could see that being an intentional choice by Apple (though one that's maybe not thought out in the context of an iPad-as-consumption-device.)
In most situations where you're staring at a composited HDR+SDR signal for a long time — e.g. a video editor editing an HDR video timeline/preview, inside an otherwise-SDR UI — the SDR content exists both before the HDR content is opened, continues to exist after it closes, and takes up the majority of the screen. So you don't want the SDR content changing its gamut just because some HDR content shows up. You want the HDR content to be squashed down to SDR for preview. If you want to check how the video looks in HDR, you'll preview the video fullscreen for a bit. (Or, if you want to always be seeing the video in HDR, then you'll use a dedicated second display that the video is always fullscreen on — as any color-grading software expects you to do.)
The scrubber widget being composited on top of HDR content is an exception to this, of course. That widget should be brought into HDR, not the other way around. But maybe this is a very low-level compositor thing, that's hard for something all the way up at the app level to signal down to to say "hey, don't mind me, we're watching a fullscreen video up here, just make me HDR!"
What's the reason for this? Also, does this happen on Linux since I know much of the driver stack for Intel GPUs is open.
Aka “hardware cursor”? That isn’t just a macOS thing, and is quite common.
(It’s been a long time since iTunes played movies, but it was pretty bloated and weird before they popped TV outta there)
You missed out on another flagship video watching app of Apple's - Front Row...
The animation on the website is "wobbling"
https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_in...
#beachball svg {
animation: spin 0.5s infinite linear;
transform-origin: 51.5% 51.5%;
}
@keyframes spin {
from {
transform: rotate(0deg);
}
to {
transform: rotate(360deg);
}
}https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape/releases
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https://www.deviantart.com/allannyholm/art/Mousecape-Throwba...
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The 2 .zip cursor packs on here https://www.macintoshrepository.org/33199-mighty-mouse
Works on Ventura.
i remember looking around for this a while ago and found nothing. with 4k+ displays these days finding the cursor is sometimes frustrating.
and the cursor radar thing is annoying to use
I think cursor customizations died with memory safety.
There are options for pointer size, outline colour and fill colour. Go nuts.
Windows (as of 11) still has the same custom cursor capabilities it's had since Windows 95, plus some bits (it can generate cursors with custom colors on the fly now). Applying custom cursors is pretty easy, and the 95-era properties sheet is still readily accessible (besides cursor schemes, there are other options there that haven't migrated to the modern Settings app).
As an aside, the Accessibility settings in both macOS and iOS are generally worth looking through, whether or not you consider yourself disabled. There's a lot of general quality-of-life settings and some neat features hidden there!
Infamously changing the pointer colour caused a huge memory leak when it was first implemented a few versions ago, hopefully that's fixed now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
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I think this started with Monterey, because on Big Sur and earlier, it always initialized in the center.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe NeXTSTEP also initialized the cursor close to the top-left corner. So this might either be an homage to NeXTSTEP (similar to how the Clarus dogcow has reappeared in macOS Ventura), or a bug. My bet is on the latter.
I have to admit "where the mouse cursor is at startup" is a very minor niggle for myself, as I rarely restart / shut down computers and the password field for the last user is usually selected and will take typing by default anyway (or after Ctrl-Alt-Del on Windows, if you're old school and turn that on). After sleep modes it could be anywhere, so you're going to be reorientating yourself anyway...
Couldn't you have just logged out?
I preferred the thorough 20s restart approach.
How is this done?
Vs. here's the cursors, here basically a direct copy. (As opposed to incidentally in another copyrighted work.) If you were to just download them an use them on your personal laptop, I doubt Apple is going to care, but if you download them & used them in a product … they might. The beachball is iconic (for better or worse).
"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
is this "for comment"?
Just displaying them (like screenshots) should be fine.
Might just be what I'm used to but for me a white bordered black cursor has always popped off the screen better than the inverse has. The default Windows cursor blends in and gets lost more easily.