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Review: Mighty Mouse 1.1Reviewed By: Mike Swope Review Date: May 9, 2003
Mighty Mouse 1.1: Sophisticated, Simple & Safe Cursor Enhancements for the Macintosh
Mighty Mouse offers some fun and fancy cursor enhancements for OS X:
Unlike other shareware applications I've used, Mighty Mouse offers a sophisticated yet painlessly simple installer, developed in-house by the Unsanity crew. I had expected to have to read a page of PDF instructions and to have to copy this file here and that file there and another file here, as one must do with many shareware offerings, but Unsanity's installer gets right down to business, quickly and efficiently. Open the installer, and 6 brief clicks later, Mac users are looking at the Mighty Mouse System Preference Panel, ready to load sample cursors supplied with the haxie. If a user happens to be upgrading from a previous release, Unsanity's installer is intelligent enough to recognize this, uninstall the old version, and continue installing the upgrade while retaining all preferences and cursors in use for a seamless upgrade. Few upgrades work this well! As with commercial installers such as Adobe, Apple and others, the Mighty Mouse installer provides information, choices and feedback during the installation process, but does it better. When the installer is first launched, the user is shown information about what Mighty Mouse is, what it does, how to install it, who publishes it, etc. This is, in truth, the Read Me document packaged into the installer window. This reiteration of the Read Me is a good idea, since many users don't take time to read these documents, myself included. Users are also given the opportunity to simply uninstall Mighty Mouse in this first window, rather than install or update.
Mighty Mouse's default installation options work fine for most users. By default, Mighty Mouse will be installed for the current user only, will not create an installation log, and will immediately launch the Mighty Mouse preference pane when the install is complete. Of course, users may choose to install Mighty Mouse for all users (requires administrative privileges), to save an installation log, and to not open the preference pane after installation. If, by chance, a user has already installed Mighty Mouse for all users and then attempts to reinstall for just the current user, Mighty Mouse warns that having two copies of Mighty Mouse installed is not a good idea and lets users elect to Remove for All Users or Install for All Users (again) or simply cancel the install. A similar warning is given in the reverse situation, and if the user elects to continue, the local copy of Mighty Mouse will be uninstalled and a global copy installed. As installation takes place, Mighty Mouse lists what has been installed along with the relevant file paths, essentially the installation log that users may have elected to save. When installation is complete, it suggests that the current user log out and then back in before using Mighty Mouse. Uninstalling Mighty Mouse is likewise thoroughly painless. One click on the Uninstall button in the first window of the installer and the installer clearly warns that Mighty Mouse files will be moved to the Trash, not deleted, listing the exact folders and files that will be moved to the Trash. In a brilliant move, Unsanity has elected to never delete files from users' hard drives with Mighty Mouse, and I suspect with their other software as well. I'm certain that other software authors have similar policies, but this is the first time I've ever seen it explicitly stated that files will never be deleted from the user's machine. Unsanity has also taken a similar safety-first approach in how Mighty Mouse operates (and, likely, its other software as well). Unlike other haxies, Mighty Mouse does not modify any system files. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. It simply installs its files and does its business. It does not insert cursors into the system. It does not delete cursors from the system. It doesn't change the system files in any way. It just changes the appearance of the system's cursors when told to do so by the user, at the user's discretion. Even if Mighty Mouse, for some reason, were to make a user's system unstable, the user simply need only uninstall Mighty Mouse because the original system files were never altered by Mighty Mouse. While preparing for this review, I ran Mighty Mouse in demo mode for weeks. The only problem I encountered (and Mighty Mouse may be designed to work this way) was that Mighty Mouse in demo mode would forget which cursors I had imported after a short time and simply default on-the-fly to the original OS X cursors without so much as a pause, stutter or hiccup. It just happened. In some cases, I didn't even notice for several minutes that the change had occurred. Then, it was a matter of just re-importing the same cursors I had been using, and I was back on my merry way. Changing System Cursors
The Mighty Mouse installer actually installs two System Preference Panes, APE Manager and Mighty Mouse. APE Manager is Unsanity's Application Enhancer, required by some of Unsanity's haxies to work their magic, including Mighty Mouse. The Mighty Mouse user doesn't need to be concerned with APE. It just installs and helps Mighty Mouse do its stuff. The Mighty Mouse preference pane, split into 3 sections, is where all the magic happens. In the top section, Available Cursors, users find buttons to import one or more saved cursors that have either been exported from Mighty Mouse or downloaded from the Internet, and export cursors that the user has created or edited with Mighty Mouse. In addition to exporting cursors as cursors, Mighty Mouse can also export animated GIFs from animated cursors. A third button in this section takes users to the ResExcellence website to download cursors for Mighty Mouse. Many of the Mighty Mouse cursors here are nicely done. Users, however, should not overlook the sample cursors supplied with Mighty Mouse for either use or inspiration. They are as good as most that can be found at ResExcellence. The sample cursors with Mighty Mouse include 4 arrow cursors, 6 cursor sets and 3 wait cursors. No matter the changes made in Mighty Mouse, Unsanity has provided a Restore Defaults button to reset all cursors back to those of Mac OS X. Editing and Creating Cursors The second section is the Cursor Editor. When a cursor is selected from the Available Cursors above, the cursor editor displays the frame and mask pairs that make up the selected cursor. For non-animated cursors, there will likely be only one frame-mask pair. For animated cursors, each frame-mask pair that create the animation (masked portions of each frame are transparent when displayed). Each cursor also has its own "hotspot"–the point of the cursor that makes the intended selection. For some cursors, this hotspot is in the upper right corner instead of the standard upper left corner. For others, it's closer to the middle of the cursor. The hotspot should make logical sense for each individual cursor. Of course, users can edit this hotspot with the Cursor Editor, too, and may also test the selected cursor, adjust its animation speed, and insert and delete frames with the Cursor Editor as well. For good animated cursors, changes likely aren't necessary. But, if a user wishes to edit the selected cursor or create an entirely new cursor, the user must first know a few things about image creation, alpha channels and frame-based animation because Mighty Mouse isn't an image editor or animation package. It's more a cursor assembler. Creating cursors, both static (non-animated) and animated, is similar to creating static and animated GIFs for a web site. As a general rule, it is also recommended to make cursors as small as reasonably possible with little wasted space for margins. Larger cursors require more processing power and may cause performance hits for users of older, slower machines. Unsanity advises that cursors should be no larger than 48x48 or they're more likely to cause performance problems. For a static cursor such as the standard arrow, a single frame-mask pair is common, though a static cursor can have multiple (but wasteful) frames. The user creates an image and a mask for the image (the area where the cursor will be transparent), saves the file as an RGB TIFF with transparency (alpha channel mask) and copies (from the Mac OS X Finder) and pastes this TIFF (or drags the TIFF from the Finder) into the selected Available Cursor. Mighty Mouse automatically creates the static cursor, complete with transparency. Users can create such transparent RGB TIFFs in the latest releases of most popular image editing applications, including Photoshop and Graphic Converter. In Photoshop, layer masks become alpha channel masks automatically when saved as a TIFF with transparency. If an RGB TIFF with transparency isn't available, the user can still edit and create cursors. The trick here is to create the image, mask and copy and paste them (or drag and drop them from the Finder) separately into the image and mask wells as appropriate in the Cursor Editor. The image itself can be in any color space (index, RGB, CMYK) to be pasted. The mask can likewise be in any color space, but it is converted to grayscale when pasted. Areas that are 100% white will be visible; areas that are 100% black will be transparent; areas that are gray will be correspondingly semi-transparent based on gray value (which can create some really cool effects, as in Sven Chambone's Fire-Wait cursor). Just as the RGB TIFF method, it is important that all graphics used to create a cursor are the same size, or the smaller graphic will be scaled to the larger size by Mighty Mouse. Animated cursors require more work but are created with similar techniques and limited to 15 frames (a limit posed by OS X). For an animated cursor to be pasted into the Available Cursors section from an RGB transparent TIFF, the image must be created in a specific way. The user must create a single graphic containing all frames of the animation distributed evenly within the image area so that each frame takes up equal space with size restrictions as noted earlier. This graphic should also contain an alpha channel mask (layer masks in Photoshop become alpha channel masks when saved as a transparent TIFF). Frames will be imported from the top of the graphic to the bottom. For example, if a graphic for an animated cursor is intended to be a 24x24 pixel 6-frame animation, the graphic will need to be 24x144 pixels. Each 24-pixel vertical segment will become a cursor. The contents of the top 24 pixel segment will become the first frame of the animation, the contents of the next 24 pixel segment will become the second frame of the animation, and so forth. When pasted into the Available Cursor section of Mighty Mouse, Mighty Mouse will ask how many frames should be created and automatically slice the graphic into the required number of equal-sized frames. In this example, the graphic would be sliced into (6) 24x24 frames. Scaling Cursors The third section is Cursor Scaling. This is a simple but potentially powerful feature for users with poor eyesight or other vision problems. Adjusting a simple slider here adjusts the size of the selected cursor from .6x (Tiny) to 5x (Huge) its original size in increments of 0.2. For example, a typical 24x24 pixel cursor can be scaled to just more than half its original size, or up to 144x144 pixels. If a cursor is already relatively large (say, larger than 24x24 pixels), then the largest scaled dimensions will be greater than 144x144 pixels. Mighty Mouse reflects the scaling dynamically beneath the scaling slider. Mighty Mouse also notes that cursor scaling may be processor intensive. Running on a 500 MHz dual-USB iBook, I noticed an appreciable delay when using a cursor scaled to the maximum amount. Unless a user has a reason for scaling a cursor, it is recommended that the user not do so. Double the Fun with CursorXP Themes CursorXP is a shareware application that enhances cursors in WinXP and uses themes like Mighty Mouse. CursorXP themes are named "filename.CurXPTheme". Although there are many more cursor states in WinXP than in Mac OS X, Mighty Mouse can use the Arrow, IBeam, NO and Wait cursors from CursorXP themes, both static and animated cursors. To access the cursors in a CursorXP theme, the Mac user needs to drag the CursorXPTheme file to Stuffit Expander. This will produce a folder containing the cursors in the expanded theme. Then the Mac user just drags this folder to the Mighty Mouse Preference Pane, and the Arrow, IBeam, NO and Wait cursors are imported into Mighty Mouse automatically. Works like a charm. Animated CursorXP cursors, however, pose a technical problem for Mighty Mouse because CursorXP animated cursors may exceed the 15-frame limit of OS X. Mighty Mouse uses frame-interpolation with CursorXP animations with more than 15 frames, but advanced users can change the default interpolation method from Multiframe to Nearest Neighbor or Localized for best results. Multiframe, the default method, is suitable for animations with little difference between adjacent frames. The Localized method produces the same results as Multiframe unless the source animation contains more than 30 frames, in which case the resulting Mighty Mouse animation contains less motion blur. The Nearest Neighbor method produces no motion blur but does not represent all the original frames in the final Mighty Mouse animation. Advanced users may wish to experiment with these methods for best results on a case-by-case basis. If an advanced user wishes to change the interpolation method, instructions to do so reside in the Mighty Mouse Read Me file. In preparing to write this review, I did some searching on Google for Windows XP cursors. Naturally, I didn't locate any files usable with Mighty Mouse. I found mostly executable (.exe) files that were probably self-expanding or self-installing. But then I reread the Mighty Mouse documentation and discovered that I should have been searching for CursorXP themes, not Windows XP cursors. Armed with this information, I found the following sites with some passable themes, such as Batman, Lightsaber, Be My Valentine, and Luck of the Irish, to use with Mighty Mouse. A Few Areas for Improvement While working with Mighty Mouse, I discovered a few things to add to the Mighty Mouse 2.0 wish list. Importing cursors is a bit cumbersome because they cannot be previewed before importing them. Perhaps Mighty Mouse 2.0 could gain a means by which to preview cursors before making the decision to import them. An image editor would also be helpful when editing and creating cursors instead of having to jump back and forth into another application to create and test proposed cursors. Another useful feature of an image editor would be a tween feature similar to those in GIF animation applications to help create animated cursors. It would also be helpful to be able to import animated GIFs as cursors if one so desired, and to import CursorXP themes from the original CurXPTheme file without having to expand the file into a folder and then dragging that folder to the Mighty Mouse Preference Pane. In fact, it would be useful to be able to select a cursor state and then import any cursor from a CurXPTheme into that state, instead of relying solely on the 4 states that WinXP and OS X share (Arrow, IBeam, NO and Wait). Overall, A Clean, Pleasant Rodent Despite some room for improvement, Mighty Mouse 1.1 is simple, well-behaved and entertaining, and more feature-rich than expected. Novice and advanced users alike can install Mighty Mouse for OS X with confidence and change their OS X system cursors as much as they wish, downloading static and animated cursors from the Internet or borrowing same from CursorXP. Adventurous users can also create their own static or animated cursors as they please, in conjunction with their favorite image editor. Mighty Mouse 1.1 lets Mac OS X users do things with their cursors that they likely hadn't imagined, without sacrificing stability. Mighty Mouse is rock solid for an initial release.
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