February 8, 2011

Green snowflake trails quite helpful

A Pinpoint cursor
I wanted to make an opaque title. Did I succeed? Yet it also describes what I want to talk about.

If you're on a Mac and using a very large screen (mine is 27 inches, and there are even bigger Mac screens) you may have experienced a problem with seeing the cursor. I sure did. I could see it at times but the damn thing was so small! It's from having a high resolution screen. In effect, the cursor disappeared all the time. I was forever moving my mouse to see if I could find it. This is especially pronounced when in a writing program like Scrivener or Word. Those I-beam cursors are gone on a big screen.

So I went to the Mac App Store, typed in cursor and voila! For $1.99 I got a program called Pinpoint. It lets you change your cursor all you want. I opted for one that leaves a trail of snowflakes when you move the mouse. (The flakes disappear instantly when you stop moving it.) I chose a bright green for the snowflakes because they're equally visible on light or dark backgrounds. That's another one of their cursor options pictured top-left. There are all kinds of circle-around-the-cursor cursors; that's just one of them. Meh, I like the snowflakes.

Problem solved. I always know where the cursor is now. Macs are cool and the App Store makes life on a Mac even better.

2 comments:

Anna Guess Pick said...

To Mac or not To Mac? - not so much of a question as it is, When?

writenow said...

Wait for them to update the line you're interested in. For instance, I think in mid March they'll put out a new MacBook Pro, their higher-priced laptop. Certainly wait till the next OS, which is also coming at about that time. The next system will be Lion. Personally I think the lower priced MacBook is fine. Just get a ton of RAM. But really, they're all great. The iMacs are gorgeous (the desktops). Switching to a Mac was one of the best decisions I ever made. You won't believe the peace you'll experience (after a few initial days of confusion).