Cursors! Boring eh? Or, at least the standard Windows set are, mostly. When I first started using Windows some 20 odd years ago (!) I used the standard set. Then I discovered that you could design your own.
I can't even remember the name of the software I was using back then. It might have been Microangelo. It was quite simple to use though. Mind you, I wasn't doing anything complicated like animated cursors. I just wanted something simple, bright and larger than the normal, to make it easy to see on the screen.
I created a big, yellow, blocky arrow and that looked good. You couldn't miss it. No way would it get lost in the clutter on the screen, usually. I then created a few others to give me a matching base set and that was more or less it for the next 15 years!
Of course, back in the days of Windows 3.1 (ah, memories) you didn't want to take up too much processor power for gimmicks such as animated cursors. With processor speeds of 133mhz and 640KBs of memory you needed as much of that as you could get to run even something as relatively unchallenging as a word processor. My current laptop has a 32bit 2.0Ghz Dual Core processor and 2GBs of memory, and that's considered old these days.
Then I discovered the metronome Busy cursor (metronom.ani) and thought it would be a refreshing change to the standard static hourglass, especially as it matched the colour of my home-made cursors, so I changed to it. That set me thinking. I'd always had in mind to animate my Arrow cursor by making the colours cycle through the colours of the rainbow.
First I needed some new software, preferably freeware since it's only going to be something I do once in a blue moon. There seemed to be quite a lot about. I decided to go with RealWorld Cursor Editor, for pretty well no other reason than it looked like something that I could start using without first having to spend a couple of days reading a manual. It's proved to be quite a good choice.
I opened my old Arrow cursor and set about it. I soon found out how to duplicate it into six more frames and used the Paint style tools to change the colour of each frame to one of the colours of the rainbow. I then chose the speed at which I wanted it to change with a simple slider bar and, once I'd got the desired effect, saved it as an animated cursor (.ani) file. I selected it in the Control Panel (Mouse > Pointers) and applied it. It looked just how I hoped it would.
Trouble was, now the others were looking a bit staid. So, next I became a little more ambitious. I selected my original Wait cursor, an Arrow with an Hourglass. Instead of making this cycle through the colours I decided to try my hand at making the hourglass look as if the sand was actually running through it rather than, as originally I had drawn it, caught in a moment in time.
This introduced me to Layers.
Now, I confess I am no artist but it didn't take me long to realise that rotating the hourglass sideways wouldn't really work: it was too big and would partly disappear off the side of the window and partly overlay the arrow on the other side. What I needed to do was to make it look like it was revolving forwards, when it would still fit where it was located.
As I didn't need to make any changes to the arrow for this exercise I deleted it from the window and then saved the remaining hourglass as a layer. Exporting it saved it in .png format. I then reversed the exercise, saving the arrow as another layer. I then set about changing the hourglass to show different amounts ofsand in the top and bottom globes.
Finally I set about compressing the hourglass vertically and then creating a frame with just a round, black circle, to make it look as if it was being viewed end on. Setting all these in order and recombining each frame with the arrow layer produced exactly the effect for which I was looking!
Finally I decided to make my own customised version of the Link Select cursor, the pointing hand that appears whenever you point to a link such as a URL. I took the standard one and changed it to my own colour scheme and then set about moving it up and down to look like it is prodding the link. That's fairly easy to do with Cursor Editor. You can select the part of the cursor you want to move and then simply drag it around the number of pixels you want. I just moved it up and down a number of frames, one pixel at a time.
I then selected it as the appropriate cursor to see what it looked like. What I hadn't expected was that the cursor wouldn't be moving! After a lot of experimenting I discovered that the reason was to do with the Hot Spot.
The Hot Spot is the pixel of the cursor that is assigned as the one that identifies the precise position of the object being selected by the icon. For an arrow, for instance, that would normally be the pixel at the point, or for a hand, the pixel at the top of the index finger. That's where I had put it but I hadn't realised that movement of the cursor is in relation to the Hot Spot! If you assign the Hot Spot to the same position in each frame and that position moves then when the cursor appears on the screen, it will not move because the relative position of the Hot Spot to the cursor doesn't change. You have to leave the Hot Spot in one place, irrespective of what movements you assign to the cursor!
Which was really the motivation for writing this blog! Of course, if I've given you an idea for creating your own cursors then, that's good too. It really isn't that difficult. Good Luck!
In fact, the most difficult bit was embedding the cursors in this blog, to show you what they looked like. It seems that Blogger doesn't like.ani files and if you convert them to animated GIFs, trying to get them displayed is also a pain. Blogger also doesn't support animated GIFs natively, by clicking the upload picture function.
In the end I decided to use IrfanView to display the cursor: it supports the display of cursor files and animated GIFs but can't currently convert them to anything else. What I then used was Windows Media Encoder to capture the screen region in IrfanView displaying the cursor and save it as a Windows Media Video (.wmv) file. That's what you see above.
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