Startrail User Guide

Startrail 2.0 Quick User Guide What is Startail? Startrail is a toy. It simply makes your mouse pointer shine in colored sparkles and creates shiny screen effects. This guide introduces you to Startrail features quickly, leaving to you the pleasure to discover the visual effects it creates. The Menus Startrail has a standard menu like all applications, plus a menu in the upper left corner of the screen to make its features and controls accessible any time you wish. The settings are all grouped in the preferences, but you can access two commands by the menus: pause and burst. Pause simply pauses the trail when it gets in the way of your work. The burst command releases a burst of particles even if the mouse pointer in not moving or the trail is paused, and it’s useful to locate the mouse pointer when you lose it. The Preferences The preferences panel is divided in three sections, to control different aspects of the application. General Preferences Here you can set different aspects of the application behaviour. • Launch Startrail at Login: makes Startrail launch every time you log in into your system. • Check for updates on startup: Startrail looks for newer versions each time it starts. • Mouse trail: enables or disables the trail that follows the mouse pointer. • Dock effect: enables or disables the effect Startrail displays each time you move the mose pointer over the dock • Mouse gestures: enables or disables effect associated to mouse gestures. The mouse gestures that activate an effect are the following (notice that you need to make these gestures ample and in the center of the screen: Fireworks Rain Fountain • Mouse sensitivity: sets the minimum mouse threshold that causes the trail to appear. It is useful to inibhit the trail on small mouse movements when you need to do precise works without having particles bursts on your way. Particles Preferences Here you can set the different parameters that affect each single particles. • Particles shape: the shape of the particles. • Rotation: the particles rotate while moving. • Fixed color: if you want a fixed color for your particles instead of the changing ones, you can choose one. • Color variation speed: if particles change color, this is the speed of this change. • Lifetime: the time the particles wil remain on screen. • Size: the maximum size of each particle. Trail Preferences Here you can set different parameters that affect the entire trail. • Particles number: the number of particles that compose the trail • Burst radius: the radius of the particle explosions that compose the trail • Wind: a left or right wind that blows particles away. • Gravity: gravity make particles fall down or, when inverted, to go up. • Continuous trail: the trail cintinues to show up also when the mouse pointer is still. As you can see, playing with …