Welcome to the world of animated cursors! Since the first time Apple introduced the rotating watch in the Finder and the rotating beachball in MPW, a lot of programs have duplicated this feature. Whether it is done to entertain you while you have to wait for a lengthy operation to complete, or whether it is just to indicate that your Mac has not crashed so far - animated cursors are today part of every major application.
But all you ever get is an animated “wait” cursor of some sort. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also have an animated arrow? In fact, wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply substitute this tiresome arrow with something more appealing?
Well, now you can - with CursorAnimator 2.0.1! CursorAnimator lets you substitute all of the five system cursors (arrow, watch, text, cross-hair, and plus) by a static or animated cursor of your choice. If your Macintosh supports color, you can even get color cursors!
CursorAnimator is a copyrighted application, but is distributed free of charge. If you decide to use it, you are asked to send a picture postcard of your hometown to the authors.
WHAT’s NEW
A few quick words for those who already know and use an older version of CursorAnimator. The new version 2.0.1 has been completely rewritten. Among the new features you will find support for color cursors (both static and animated), an improved user interface (featuring balloon help), better memory handling, and lots of new cursors. We have also included an extension for ResEdit 2.1 that allows cursor designers to preview animated cursors within ResEdit.
Before installing the new version 2.0.1, please open your System Folder (or the Control Panels folder inside your System Folder, if you are running System 7) and deinstall any old version of CursorAnimator by dragging its icon to the desktop. We recommend that you do not throw away the old version immediately. You might want to transfer all your collected cursors from the old to the new version before discarding it.
COLOR CURSORS - A NEW FRONTIER
If your Macintosh supports color, you may want to take advantage of the new color capability of CursorAnimator 2.0.1. In addition to regular black&white cursors you can now also substitute all of the five system cursors with static and animated color cursors. There is, however, a small problem associated with animating color cursors: Apple never meant them to be animated! Therefore, CursorAnimator has to rely on some pretty dirty tricks (for details, see the technical section below) to support animated color cursors. As a result, we have to include the following warning - and we are really serious about this:
•WARNING• - THE ANIMATION OF COLOR CURSORS IS NEITHER GUARANTEED
TO WORK ON ALL MACINTOSH MODELS NOR UNDER ALL CONFIGURATIONS. IF
YOU ARE EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS WITH ANIMATED COLOR CURSORS,
PLEASE TRY USING THE “DRIVER” VERSION OR ENTIRELY DISABLE COLOR
ANIMATION. YOU CAN SET THESE PREFERENCES IN THE “SETUP DIALOG”
(SEE BELOW). THE AUTHORS TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES
RESULTING FROM THE USE OF CURSORANIMATOR.
INSTALLATION
Installing CursorAnimator is very easy (both under System 6 and 7): simply drag the “CursorAnimator 2.0.1” icon onto your “System Folder” icon and restart your Macintosh. Voilá, you are ready to go!
USAGE
To customize CursorAnimator, go to the Control Panels in the Apple Menu and double- click on the “CursorAnimator 2.0.1” icon. You will see a panel that lets you choose different cursors, import new cursors into CursorAnimator, and modify its settings.
The list shows you all cursors that are currently loaded into CursorAnimator. Some of these cursors will be animated and some will be static, but both are handled the same way in CursorAnimator. From this list you can choose any cursor to replace one of the five standard system cursors (arrow, watch, text, cross-hair, and plus). You can also choose a different cursor to be displayed when the mouse button is pressed.
The grid is the place where you designate which system cursor should be replaced. It shows five columns for the five system cursors and two rows for the two states of the mouse button (up or down). To change the appearance of any system cursor, drag a cursor from the list to the spot in the grid that you want to change. To get back an original system cursor, you can either drag the grey square titled “default” from the list to the grid, or you can alternatively drag the system cursor from the top of the grid to one of the corresponding spots below.
You can also get additional information about each cursor or change the speed of its animation sequence. To do so, either double-click on the cursor, drag it to the information button, or simply press the information button to get information about the currently selected cursor.
The disk button allows you to import and export cursors from CursorAnimator. To export a cursor, simply drag it to the disk icon. A dialog will come up and you will be asked to name the cursors and save it. To import a new cursor, click on the disk icon. A dialog will allow you to select a file and import the cursors from that file. If you have just updated from an older version of CursorAnimator, you might want to use the import feature to load all the cursors from your old version (assuming that you haven’t already deleted it). All you have to do is click the disk icon and then select the old version of CursorAnimator.
To remove a cursor from the list, drag it to the trash. Doing so will immediately delete that cursor. Unlike the Finder, CursorAnimator does not provide a way to drag a cursor out of the trash again.
The last icon (the one with the initials “CA”) provides you with additional information about CursorAnimator itself. It leads to a few screens containing copyright and distribution information as well as a brief online documentation. You will also find a button that allows you to change the global settings for CursorAnimator.
The memory indicator is only active if your Macintosh supports color and you have enabled color animations in the setup dialog. In this case CursorAnimator will allocate a portion of memory upon startup that will exclusively be used for animating color cursors. The grey portion of the bar indicates how much of this memory is used at the moment. It will grow as you add and use more complex color animations. Should the grey bar grow bigger than about 75%, we recommend that you adjust the memory CursorAnimator allocates during startup in the setup dialog (see below).
Should you ever become confused while working with CursorAnimator, you are more than welcome to turn on Balloon Help if you are running System 7. CursorAnimator fully supports Balloon Help for all operations and will give you helpful hints for the various items in the control panel.
SETUP DIALOG
CursorAnimator allows you to configure some global settings. From the main control panel click on the “CA” icon, then press the “Setup” button. This will bring up a dialog that lets you specify the global settings for CursorAnimator.
The first box (“Show Startup Icon”) allows you to specify if you’d like to see an icon when CursorAnimator is successfully installed upon startup. The icon will be crossed out if CursorAnimator is disabled or an error is encountered during installation.
The second box (“Disable CursorAnimator”) allows you to completely turn off CursorAnimator. Alternatively you can also remove CursorAnimator from the System Folder (or the Control Panels folder, if you are running System 7).
The third box (“Disable Color Animations”) allows you to only turn off the animation of color cursors. For a detailed discussion of the problems associated with color cursors please refer to the technical section below. Use this option if you are experiencing problems with CursorAnimator on a Macintosh that supports color.
The fourth box (“Use Driver”) switches to a relatively safe technique for animating color cursors. If you are experiencing problems with animated color cursors, but do not wish to turn off color animations entirely, this switch provides an in-between solution. While this method will prevent the problems associated with animated color cursors, it will also affect the speed and smoothness of animation.
The two buttons “+” and “–” allow you to specify the size of the memory segment that CursorAnimator will set aside at startup to enable color animations. If you are not restricted by available RAM size, we recommend that you leave this set to 32KB. You might want to increase this setting if you find yourself using many complex animation sequences for your cursors. The memory indicator in the CursorAnimator main control panel will give you a good idea of how much memory you are effectively using. A reasonable guess is to always reserve twice as much memory as you usually need.
In order for any of these settings to take effect, you will have to close CursorAnimator and restart your Macintosh.
CREATING YOUR OWN CURSORS AND ANIMATIONS
To design your own cursors and animations you will need to use ResEdit or a similar resource editing application. You can obtain a copy of ResEdit from many commercial on-line services (e.g. CompuServe, GEnie, America Online), from the Internet (by anonymous ftp from the host ftp.apple.com [130.43.2.3]), from various user groups, from APDA (the Apple Programmers and Developers Association), or included with the books “ResEdit Complete” (Peter Alley and Carolyn Strange, Addison-Wesley, 1991, 546 pages) and “Zen and the Art of Resource Editing” (ed. Derrick Schneider, BMUG, 1991, 85 pages). The following paragraph assumes that you know how to use ResEdit and have understood the basic concepts of resource editing. We will not include an introduction to ResEdit in this documentation. If you are not familiar with any of the terms in this paragraph, please refer to one of the books mentioned above (“ResEdit Complete” contains an excellent introduction to the concept behind resources, to using ResEdit, and also contains a chapter of its own that specificly deals with cursors - we can highly recommend this book).
To be able to better view your new animations and cursors, we are providing a small extension to ResEdit that will allow you to see the actual animations inside ResEdit. This extension requires ResEdit version 2.1 (or higher) - do not attempt to install it into an older version of ResEdit! To install the extension, double-click on the file “acur picker” and copy its contents into the ResEdit Preferences file (which can be found inside the System Folder or inside the Preferences folder - depending on if you are running System 6 or 7).
In creating your own customized cursors and animations you will be dealing with three resource types: ‘CURS’ resources contain regular black&white cursors, ‘crsr’ resources contain color cursors (including a black&white version), and ‘acur’ resources contain the description of the animation (i.e. the sequence of ‘CURS’ or ‘crsr’ resources to be displayed). CursorAnimator uses the ‘acur’ resources to determine which cursors belong together and form an animation. Consequently, even when designing a simple static cursor, you will need to create an ‘acur’ resource (which in this case will only contain one cursor).
To begin designing a new animation you will first need to create the cursors forming the individual frames of the animation. Depending on whether you want to design a color animation or not, you will need to create ‘crsr’ or ‘CURS’ resources. Since the ‘crsr’ resource type does always also contain a black&white version, in most cases it is sufficient to design color cursors only. CursorAnimator will automatically extract the black&white version from the ‘crsr’ resource type when running on a Macintosh model that does not support color.
After you have designed the cursors, create a new ‘acur’ resource and enter the number of frames as well as the resource IDs of the cursors comprising the individual frames. You will also have to specify a delay that tells CursorAnimator how many ticks (1/60ths of a second) to wait between individual frames. The following example shows a simple animation consisting of three frames played at moderate speed.
Once you are done, choose “Get Info” from the “Resource” menu and give the new resource a name. This name will also appear in the list in CursorAnimator once you import your new cursor or animation. You might want to take a look at the different examples included with CursorAnimator to get a feeling for what else you can do with these resources.
If you would like to include some additional information with your animation, you can create a ‘TEXT’ resource, which should have the same ID as your ‘acur’ resource. Please note, that you may used styled text (i.e. different fonts, sizes, and styles of text) in a ‘TEXT’ resource. The corresponding style information will be stored in a resource of type ‘styl’ with the same ID as the ‘TEXT’ resource. CursorAnimator fully supports both ‘TEXT’ and ‘styl’ resources, so your text will be displayed with the appropriate style when the user requests information about a cursor within CursorAnimator.
In a previous version of CursorAnimator we did also include an entire library of animated cursors. To keep CursorAnimator to a resonable size (suitable for electronic distribution), we did, however, decide to include only our favorite black&white animations along with a couple of color cursors. We trust that you will design some great cursors on your own and that you will also soon be able to find new cursors on various bulletin boards and commercial on-line services.
When designing new cursors and animations, do not try to use ResEdit to edit things inside the “CursorAnimator 2.0.1” file. CursorAnimator internally does not use ‘acur’ resources to represent animations (see the technical section below). Please do only use the import and export functions to modify cursors and animations inside CursorAnimator.
TECHNICAL BACKGROUND
This section explains some of the concepts behind CursorAnimator. It is meant to satisfy the curiosity of a few computer freaks and hackers. If you have never programmed on the Macintosh, you may want to skip this section.
CursorAnimator is a Control Panel (CDEV) that installs a vertical retrace task upon startup in order to animate cursors. Communication between the control panel and the task is done via a Gestalt interface. The ‘acur’ resources imported into CursorAnimator are automatically transformed to ‘Anim’ resources, which contain a more extensible description of animation sequences. For regular black&white cursors the vertical retrace task simply sets a different cursor according to the description in the ‘Anim’ resources. Animating color cursors is more tricky, because color cursors may not be changed during interrupt time. Therefore, CursorAnimator has to allocate a private heap inside the System heap during startup, which is subsequently used to store all expanded color cursors. While this technique seems to be working fine under most circumstances, it is still relying on some undocumented features and might therefore not work on all Macintosh models. For this very reason, CursorAnimator can be used with a regular driver instead of the vertical retrace task. Since the driver is executed less frequently than the vertical retrace task, both speed and smoothness of the animation will be substantially lower when using the driver.
When you export cursors from CursorAnimator, you will find that these files do also contain ‘Anim’ resources instead of ‘acur’ resources. In a future version of CursorAnimator we are planning to provide an editor for ‘Anim’ resources as well. For the moment, please do restrict yourself to editing ‘acur’ resources only.
HISTORY
Version 1.0: Original version. Animation of watch cursor only.
Version 1.1: Animation of all standard system cursors (except the arrow).
Version 1.2: Animation and static replacement of all standard system cursors
(including the arrow).
Version 2.0: This version - a total rewrite with zillions of new features...
COPYRIGHT, DISTRIBUTION, AND LIMITATIONS ON LIABILITY
Any commercial distribution of CursorAnimator or distribution as an endorsement to buy another product is prohibited without written consent from the authors.
This software is distributed on an “as is” basis. The authors make no warranties, either express or implied, by statue or otherwise, regarding the enclosed computer software product, its quality, its performance, or its fitness for any particular purpose.
If you use this program, we kindly ask you to send a picture postcard of your home town to the following address:
Wilhelm M. Plotz
Siedlungsstrasse 21
A-4222 St. Georgen a. d. Gusen
Austria / Europe
Please do include the version of CursorAnimator (2.0.1) you are using as well as possible feedback and suggestions. If you did already send a postcard for a previous version of CursorAnimator (i.e. < 2.0), we would hereby like to thank you, but at the same time we would still like to ask you to send a new postcard for this version, because we would like to find out how far version 2.0.1 spreads compared to the 1.2 version. We do keep all the postcards we get and occasionally also do some statistical comparisons (see below).
If you would like to send bug reports or feedback (and have already sent your postcard!), you can also reach us over electronic mail under one of the following addresses:
Internet: K340950@edvz.uni-linz.ac.at
Bitnet: K340950@ALIJKU11
AppleLink: FALK2
CompuServe: 100010,501
GEnie: FALK2
BIX: FALK2
Delphi: FALK2
X.400: /c=at/a=ada/p=telebox/s=FALK2/
A BIG THANK YOU AND SOME STATISTICS
We would hereby like to express our thanks to all the people who sent postcards for an older version of CursorAnimator. So far, we have received approximately 580 postcards from 35 differnt countries. Although most of them originated from the USA, we have fortunately already received postcards from all continents except Antarctica (is nobody there using a Macintosh?). Following are some statistics.
We received...
73% from the USA (46 states),
14% from Europe (16 countries),
6% from America excluding USA (4 Countries),
4% from Asia (9 countries),
2% from Australia & New Zealand
1% from Africa (3 countries).
The top twenty States/Countries on our list are:
1.) California (20.7%)
2.) Canada (5.5%)
3.) Texas (4.9%)
4.) New York (4.5%)
5.) Washington (3.8%)
6.) Florida and Massachusetts (2.8%)
8.) Pennsylvania (2.6%)
9.) Arizona and Great Britain (2.4%)
11.) Germany (2.1%)
12.) Oregon and France (1.9%)
14.) Italy, New Jersey, and Michigan (1.7%)
17.) Ohio, Colorado, Japan, Australia, and Wisconsin (1.6%)
…
35.) Austria (0.7%)
Well, there are actually 22 names on this list. First, there are five countries on number 17 and we also simply couldn’t resist to list our home country...
There are several possible interpretations for these statistics: either more Macintosh computers are sold in California than anywhere else in the world, or more people in California have access to computer networks and therefore to CursorAnimator, or more people in California like cute useless gadgets (such as CursorAnimator), or postcards are less expensive in California (just kidding!), or ...
We have also received mail from some pretty exotic countries (at least from our point of view): Fiji, Kenja, Thailand, Disneyland, Hong Kong, Iceland, and Guatemala.
Again, thank you all for writing!!! And please keep those postcards coming.
THE FUTURE
We do have a couple of ideas for future enhancements, but we would also like to hear from you what you would like to see in a future version. Therefore, please do send a postcard to the address above and include your suggestions.
KNOWN BUGS & LIMITATIONS
Some aplications use cursors that look exactly like standard system cursors, but effectively differ from them in some bits (e.g. the watch cursors in “MS Word 4.0” and “Trapeze”). While users usually don’t see these differences, CursorAnimator does. Such cursors will therefore not start an animation. However, this is a bug in the cursor design of those applications.
Sometimes Pyro™ 4.0 will not go into sleep mode if you try to force a sleep by selecting “Sleep” from the “Special” menu in the Finder or by moving the mouse into the designated corner of the screen. Sleep caused by inactivity will, however, still occur. While this problem is not 100% reproducible, it is very likely caused by Pyro, since there are no conflicts whatsoever between CursorAnimator and After Dark.
There is an old system extension named “ColorCursor” by Matthias Ulrich, which is in the public domain. Recently this extension has been revived with a different 3D-shaded arrow cursor under the name “3-D-Cursor” (by Larry Rymal). Both extension will only work properly if loaded after CursorAnimator. This is an intrinsic problem associated with the way color cursors work on the Macintosh and cannot be avoided. It is neither a bug in CursorAnimator nor in the other two extensions. We would, however, like to suggest that you simply remove both ColorCursor and 3-D-Cursor, since version 2.0.1. of CursorAnimator also includes color cursors and therefore supersedes the functionality of the other two extensions.
We would again like to warn you that animation of color cursors is not guaranteed to work on all Macintosh models and under all software configurations. If you are experiencing any problems, please turn off color animation or select “Use Driver” in the setup dialog (see section above).
CREDITS
CursorAnimator has been written using Symantec THINK C™ 4.0, which we consider to be one of the best C development systems for the Macintosh (unfortunately their international support really sucks - we still haven’t been able to get an update to version 5.0!). The user interface as well as the included cursors have been created using ResEdit 2.1.1 and debugging was done using MacsBug 6.2.1. Our thanks go to the developers of these three tools.
For some of the included cursors we have received permission by the author to distribute them as part of CursorAnimator. Others have previously been distributed on various bulletin boards and as part of public domain software collections, so that their redistribution as part of this non-commercial package should not infringe any copyrights. Our thanks go to Larry Rymal, Jim Trudeau, Eric Weis, Noel Gouveia, and Apple Computer, Inc. for designing some of the enclosed cursors.
TRADEMARKS
Apple, the Apple logo, Finder, ResEdit, System 7, Balloon Help, and MacsBug are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. and THINK C is a trademark of Symantec Technologies, Inc.
