Mighty Mouse Cursors

Very nice

ah ok this would be a better place to put this..

(they move though, just not in the jpg)
- - - - -
http://n8x.vze.com/

I'm working on "porting" all of the wait cursors I made for Blobber/Beachball. I'm also working on a nice StarCraft cursor. I will post them as soon as they are done.

This is the beta set of Aqua cursors I started. The forbidden cursor is different from the others, Im curious as to whether users like the softer look of the others or the more pronounced look of the forbidden cursor. I already know I will be making too versions of the set, one in the size shown here and another set which is a bit larger. The shadows will be darker also.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by n8x:
[B]ah ok this would be a better place to put this..

(they move though, just not in the jpg)

Man these are sweet!

swiz..

graphite version too, please =)

Firstm I think the cursors should be more blue. Second, the forbidden cursor looks crappy, IMHO. Besides that, nice set.

The forbidden crappiness, do you mean the Aqua style looks crappy or the fact that it is a widget with an X on it? More blue will do. A graphite version is definitely forthcoming also.

I made several huge-ass ones, but I only have two uploaded at the moment and I'm too frustrated to upload the others (network problems).





Actual size.

Something simple:

Oh that's nice, post pls!

I have made some cursor sets: the first one is

Fishes! - a set of cursors based on my Adium Fish Icon set

and

Ultimate Discs- Frisbee Discs... really big!

You all can probably guess which ones are which in the download list...

http://homepage.mac.com/nebagakid/FileSharing23.html

I'll post my cursor in this thread too because I don't think anyone saw it in the other threads I posted it in. Either that or everyone that downloaded it is so fascinated with it that they are unable to post. (Or maybe everyone hates it and is too polite to say anything :-] )

Here's the full version of my StealthFighter cursor that was kindof included with the app as the 'flasher' arrow. It was called that because it has very small lights on it that you can see against dark backgrounds, but that name sucks so I changed it. I made a right handed version for freaks that prefer that over the original lefty one....

The cursor doesn't change form much because I think that's distracting. When you are over text it becomes transparent (instead of an iBeam) so you can read thru it. and for the wait cursor it pulses transparent and opaque. Try it out!

Download by clicking the pix below...

Where did you get the beautful Aqua Blob? That's the ONLY thing I want changed with my cursors at this time.

I'm trying to create my own cursor even though I fail to understand how masks work exactly (I master them poorly) and when I drag the image onto Mighty Mouse...I don't see any cross-hair. Can anyone help me? Don't know what I did wrong.

The masks work just like with themes... whatever is black is transparent, white is opaque, and grey is translucent. You can copy and paste them into the boxes below the big window from photoshop or whatever. As far as the crosshairs not being there, I've seen that bug before too, I think if you quit sysprefs and start it up again it may be there. It seems to come from pasting a drastically larger cursor image in the box than what was there before. You could try importing a big cursor like the big gears one and then pasting yours in. (I am the master of the bug workaround after using the buggiest program in the world for 4 years at work - Alias/Wavefront autostudio).

The masking is a bit different than themes in that you dont have to premultiply them.

I've never been able to understand what premultiplying even is, but I don't think I've done it when I made my themes, and they worked fine. I made a mask for the stuff in the theme the same way I made my cursor and my icons... creating a black mask for the shape. What the heck is premultiplying?

Me too! Has anybody re-created the ACTUAL aqua blob that was in the Jag betas? With *all* the frames and the right shadow?

I have. But unfortunately it does not look as good because Mighty Mouse uses the mask different.

My wait cursor for those that are interested:



Just drag this pic to the Mighty Mouse pane to use it

Can you post the frames a TIFF so I can mess around with them?

Here it is:

This is the exact same graphics as in the jaguar betas, but as I said, the mask looks bad in Mighty Mouse. If you are able to fix it, please post it and tell me how you did it.

The easiest way to handle masks in Mighty Mouse is to not worry about them. Create your image in Photoshop so that it has a transparent background and then save it as a TIFF with transparency. Drag your TIFF onto the frame you wish to replace. Voila.

The aqua blob that comes with Mighty Mouse is the original Aqua blob, but as noted before, it has the problem that all of the cursors that have been sucked out of the OS have - it's already been premultiplied and MM premultiplies it again when it applies it. It needs to be unpremultiplied. I'll work on this today.

For those who are curious, here's the deal with premultiplying: Let's say you've got a four-channel image that you're attempting to composite on top of an existing image (this is the case when you draw a cursor). The source image has Red, Green, Blue and Alpha channels - Alpha specifies the amount of transparency as a real value between 0 and 1. The destination image (the background) has Red, Green and Blue channels.

I'll denote these seven channels as

• Rs - Red Source
• Gs - Green Source
• Bs - Blue Source
• A - Alpha Source
• Rd - Red Destination
• Gd - Green Destination
• Bd - Blue Destination

The final channels (after compositing) are denoted by:

• Rf - Red Final
• Gf - Green Final, or GirlFriend
• Bf - Blue Final

The equations that relate all of these and that are used to determine the final appearance are:

code:

---

Rf = A * Rs + (1 - A) * Rd
Gf = A * Gs + (1 - A) * Gd
Bf = A * Bs + (1 - A) * Bd

---

If you look at these, you'll notice that there's an operation that doesn't depend on the destination image - the multiplication between Alpha and the source channel. Since this needs to be done every time you composite the image, and it doesn't depend on the compositing circumstances, you can save a little bit of CPU time by doing it in advance - premultiplying.

So, let's denote our premultiplied channels by:

• Rs' = Premultiplied Red Source
• Gs' = Premultiplied Green Source
• Bs' = Premultiplied Blue Source

The premultiplication equations are

code:

---

Rs' = A * Rs
Gs' = A * Gs
Bs' = A * Bs

---

and the new compositing equations are

code:

---

Rf = Rs' + (1 - A) * Rd
Gf = Gs' + (1 - A) * Gd
Bf = Bs' + (1 - A) * Bd

---

The problem with the Mighty Mouse cursors that originally came from the operating system is that when I slurped them out of the OS, they'd already been premultiplied. When you reapply them with Mighty Mouse, they are premultiplied again, resulting in a double-premultiplication.


Anyway, to conclude, the intent was that Mighty Mouse users don't need to worry about premultiplication, or even know or care what it is. I'll fix this issue, and in the meantime, post some default cursors that aren't premultiplied.

So, if you didn't understand the math lesson, don't worry about it - you can still enjoy your yummy, juicy, delicious cursors!

best one yet ! Thx

Here's one based on the OSX installer progress blobs:

Progress

Why can't I place a preview image in this post? Anyone?

Read my first post in this thread, if you follow it exactly, youll see what premultiplying is. If you miss any of the steps though you'll be totally bunked.
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread....ght=premultiply

swiz - is there any way to reverse the premultiply process? Since MM premultiplies a already premultiplied cursor they look bad.



Also - is there a quick way to make a gif animation of a MM cursor? I have a bunch now and it would be convinient if it was possible to make previews in a easy way.

Unfortunately I dont know of any method for reversing the premultiplication. If there is a method of doing so maybe Synotic could shed some light.

The quickest way I could think of for making the cursor animation previews would be to use this little app, http://www.macupdate.com/download.p...rosx.sit?id=235