Custom cursors - anyone?

[Scott Raney]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 Barry Levine <themacguy at macosx.com> wrote:

> Isn't anyone using a cursor of their own design? How is it done?

Both RR and MC use these all over the place in their own UIs, so it's
certainly supported.  The problem is that most image editing programs
store images with full colormaps even when only a couple of colors are
used.  The engine doesn't know what colors are actually used in those
images, and so just chooses the first two which are often (usually?)
not where the data is actually stored.

The solution is simple: just paint on the imported cursor image with
one of the painting tools (e.g., paint a black pixel black with the
pencil tool) which will cause the engine to do a proper colormap
calculation which will allow it to show the image correctly as a
cursor.  Note that you will have to "close" the image after painting
it and before using it as a cursor, either by closing the card or
stack the image was imported onto.

Also, note that the built-in painting tools are more than adequate for
this kind of work and so there's no real reason to use an external
image editing program at all IMHO.
  Regards,
    Scott

> Thanks,
> Barry

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...