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Provides: Assistance in demonstrating and/or teaching software
Developer: Boinx Software
Requirements: Mac OS X.4 or greater, Graphics Card with Quartz Extreme support
Retail Price: Single user: $16.95, Family user $29.95
Processor: G5 or Intel
Snow Leopard: Compatible

Ever since the mouse became a pointing device, one of the more common problems was locating the mouse's cursor on the screen if you didn't already know where it was. So, you wiggle the mouse around hoping to see a wiggling thing somewhere out of the corner of your eye, and eventually, ah, there it is. That's a bit annoying, but is not frustrating. What is frustrating is when you are watching a demonstration and the presenter is moving his mouse all around the screen explaining this or that, and you can't follow what he is saying because you do not know where the #%@@# mouse is. Well, that presenter is not using Mouseposé. If you do presentations and get Mouseposé, you may or may not improve your computer teaching, but at least your audience will not be frustrated because they do not know your mouse's location.

Simply, Mouseposé provides visual cues about what and where you are doing things on your computer. This leaves you to explain about the processes you are demonstrating without having to explain the the whatabouts and whereabouts of the things you are demonstrating.

Mouseposé is very configurable. The main control panel is seen below. Here, you can control the size of the lighted circle, the sharpness of the edge, and the degree of opacity. As you move your cursor, the lighted ring moves with the cursor so the viewer always knows exactly where the mouse is located. It's like a spotlight on the cursor.

In addition to the main Mouseposé effect, you may also want to let people know when you are clicking on your screen. After all, your audience is not likely to hear your clicking, but they can see them if you use Mouseposé's Mouse Clicks. [If you want, you can turn on "click" sounds, but that can get irritating if you have a click-heavy presentation.]

Mouse Clicks, as shown below, display a red circle if you click on your image, and a series of red concentric circles if you double-click your screen. The animation refers to expanding circles from the click origin. You can have different colors for right-clicking. Like the Mouseposé effect, you can control the size of the circles and how long any effects last. The one surprising limitation is you will not obtain the green right-click color when you Control-click, which, for all intents and purposes, is the same thing as a right-click. As such, when using the Control key, you will get the red indicator, not the green. This will certainly affect those who are presenting on a MacBook and are using the trackpad, and may be a good excuse to get yourself a cheap 3-button mouse for presentations.

Besides moving your mouse around and clicking on the screen, there's also the issue of keyboard activities. These are also dealt with by going to the Keystrokes tab so you can display large characters on the screen for whichever keys you press (including modifier keys such as Shift, Option, Control, and Command). Using Keystrokes as you manually type out the various controlling key operations when demonstrating software, your audience will know exactly which keys you've pressed. If your demonstration includes typing text during your presentation, you can turn Keystrokes on or off via a hotkey. Alternatively, you can set the Filter Options to only display key commands that are accompanied with modifier keys. (This later option would not be effective if you are demonstrating software that lets you can select various tools via single letter selections.) My guess is that it's easier to simply let your text scroll on than trying to remember to turn Keystrokes on or off as needed.

I've done several presentations using Mouseposé, and at this point the response has ranged from favorable to strongly favorable, with no one complaining. While seeing the occasional red or green color blip on the screen or the text commands showing can potentially be a bit distracting, the benefits generally out way the negatives. In each demonstration I offered to turn off the effects if they were distracting to anyone, and no one wanted me to turn off Mouseposé.

Despite all this, there are some issues with Mouseposé. It can make a poor presenter look worse, or the application can make your images look worse. Consider...

One of the biggest complaints I have with some presenters is their (seemingly) hacking the program while they are trying to teach a process. By that, I mean that the presenters go to a menu to select something and they scroll up and down looking for the command, switch to a different menu, scroll up and down, then back to the previous menu, and, after scrolling around a bit, finally select what they were looking for.

As said earlier, Mouseposé will not make you a better presenter. If you do not know what you are doing, Mouseposé can potentially help prove your limitations by showing the mouse hack around as you try to find what you are looking for. But if you do know what you are doing, Mouseposé will enhance your presentation so that your viewers can see where you cursor is at all times, know what you are clicking on, and know whether you are clicking or double-clicking. Fortunately the problem is not with Mouseposé, and the solution is easy: practice practice practice.

My only complaint with Mouseposé itself has to do with the main effect: the light circle showing where your cursor is located at all times. Below is an image, just a basic simple image. Now, let's say you were demonstrating an image-enhancement software package and you started Mouseposé.

Below is the same image with Mouseposé on, and you can see the problem. While it's very easy to see where the cursor is located, the entire image is now darkened to provide the contrast for the light region around the cursor. Sadly, it's hard to demonstrate how to set proper exposure and/or enhancement settings on an image when peripheral software is screwing up your lightness/darkness.

It is possible to alter and fine-tune the lightness/darkness to a degree, but no matter how much I futzed with the settings, I didn't obtain any setting I liked. And even if I did find a setting I liked, there was no way I could save that setting for future use. What is desperately needed is the ability to create a dark ring around the cursor. I'd want to see the same levels of customization where one could increase/decrease the thickness, size, and blur of this ring. But I want a ring around the cursor, not darkening of the entire screen.

The good news is that one can activate all three, or activate any one or two of the effects. Thus, if you do not want and/or need all of the potential effects, you do not have to use them all, using only the one(s) you want. These can be controlled via hot keys, or via controls accessed from the Dock or from the Menu Bar. (There is a preference that displays the application either in the Dock and/or the Menu Bar.)

In short, when I do presentations nowadays, Mouseposé is on first. Unfortunately, when I'm doing an image related presentation, the main Mouseposé effect is turned off. I like the customization features of Mouseposé and I do like what the application does and can do. What I'd really like to see is a "ring" around the cursor instead of the lighted region, and I'd also like to see the ability to save the settings for future use. With all of the customization that this application can do, to not have the ability to save and load settings is a strange limitation.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.