CursorXP Options

Stardock CursorXP 1.1

Manual & Skinning Guide

Table of Contents

An introduction to CursorXP
This short chapter introduces you to CursorXP and how it works.

What does it do?

The Basics
This section tells you all you need to know to select themes, modify them, and set generic Cursor XP preferences.

Selecting themes
CursorXP preferences

Special Effects & Trails
In addition to the wonderful cursors, CursorXP can provide a range of special effects.

Special Effects
Cursor Trails

Getting creative – An introduction
This section briefly describes what elements you can customize using Cursor XP, and the graphics you need to do this.

Source Graphics
Animations

Creating themes – Making cursors
Creating your own theme is actually very simple once you have your graphics. You now know about the types of graphics you can use so this section shows you how to put them together into a theme.

Transparency

Creating themes – Adding effects
Special effects are very simple to create. This section shops you how to create the image and how to make it accessible to Cursor XP

The image
Making the effect available

Creating themes – Adding trails
Even more simple than effects this chapter shows you how to create cursor trails.

The Image
Making the Trail available

Additional resources
Examine this section if you want to find other sources of information regarding Cursor XP and Cursor XP skins.

Getting Cursor XP skins
Additional tools

An introduction to Cursor XP

This short chapter introduces you to Cursor XP and how it works.

Cursor XP is a utility which allows you to have much more flexibility in the cursors you use to interact with Windows. Let’s face it, Windows cursors are at best dull, and can even become annoying if you choose to use those ghastly dinosaur ones! Adding a shadow under Windows 2000 and XP was hardly a great advance and therefore Cursor XP exists to give you more – much more.

What does it do?

CursorXP integrates tightly into Windows, providing you with additional tabs on your Mouse control panel in order to access additional features.

You have many options available to you via the 3 tabs provided by Cursor XP.

The first is to improve the look of your cursor. Through use of alpha blending, transparency and other effects CursorXP allows amazing graphical cursors, both static and animated.

You can also add special effects, which can be activated on a variety of actions such as clicking. Different effects can be attached to different actions.

You can also add trial effects that follow your cursor as you move it. With windows you could only add a cursor ghost, but Cursor XP provides much more flexibility.

The Basics

This section tells you all you need to know to select themes, modify them, and set generic Cursor XP preferences.

CursorXP makes it very easy to amend your cursor requirements. The first thing to do is to learn how to change themes. We will then examine all the standard Cursor XP preferences which allow you to adjust the style of cursors displayed. The final section shows you how to change individual cursors and their settings.

Selecting themes

Cursor XP comes with several themes built in, changing your theme is easy. All you need to do is to select your choice of theme from the dropdown list, and click ‘Apply’ or ‘OK’.

You will notice that there are 2 options at the bottom of the list <Browse> and <New theme>. Selecting <Browse> will allow you to search for theme files on your computer.

Selecting <New theme> creates a blank theme (using regular Windows cursors which you can then start to edit as is shown in Chapter 4.

Clicking the information button will provide information about the theme (typically the author and their comments)

Cursor XP preferences

Clicking the ‘Options’ button will allow you to set a series of global preferences that allow you to adjust the appearance of your cursors. These effects apply to all themes used by Cursor XP. Once you have applied these settings you will also need to apply them in the main Mouse properties dialogue before they will take effect.

Shadows

Windows allows you to specify whether your cursors have shadows or not, that is it. Cursor XP allows far more options:

Height: choose how far the shadow is offset from the cursor, and therefore woe ‘high’ the cursor appears to be.

Angle: specify at which angle the shadow should be placed from the cursor. 0° corresponds to ‘south’ of the cursor (below it), and 90° which corresponds to ‘east’ of the cursor (to the right of it).

Sharpness: this is how ‘blurred’ the shadow is. A ‘sharp’ shadow will have crisp edges, whereas a ‘Soft’ cursor will be blurred.

Darkness: allows you to change how dark the cursor is.

Transparency

Through the use of this setting you can adjust the transparency of the cursor. Moving the slider to the left increases the amount of transparency or your cursor.

The more transparent your cursor, the more you will see your desktop and windows through it.

Color

If you want a different color variant of your cursors, then rather than having to edit the original cursor graphics Cursor XP allows you to adjust the color. There are 2 ways to do this.

A hue shift is represented by 2 lines of color. The top one represents the original color within the cursor. Simply moving the slider adjusts the second line so that where the top color exists in the cursor, it will be replaced by the color in the bottom line.

Alternatively you can manually adjust the amount of Red, Blue and Green in the cursors by selecting the RGB option and moving the appropriate sliders. This is particularly useful for colorizing greyscale cursors.

Size

At different resolutions and on different occasions you may want different sized cursors. For example, if you are doing a presentation, then an extra large ‘hand’ cursor may be useful for pointing to things.

Again, rather than having to edit the original cursors, Cursor XP allows you to adjust this parameter within the Options.

Preferences

Here you can adjust the other generic preferences.

The first 2 options allow you to flip the cursor and it’s shadow horizontally. This may be useful if you are left handed or use a language that is written from right to left.

You can also select an option to place a CursorXP icon in the System Tray, to allow quick access to cursor configuration.

Next you can choose a key combination to enable and disable Cursor XP. This may be required when running some games and media applications.

The final option is to set the language in which the Cursor XP is presented. You can get additional language files here.

Special Effects & Trails

In addition to the wonderful cursors, Cursor XP can provide a range of special effects.

Before Cursor XP there was little visual excitement to be achieved through moving your cursor or clicking buttons. Cursor XP brings a range of special effects that can be associated with button clicks, and much more than the standard Windows cursor ghost.

Special Effects

In addition to different cursors, you can have additional special effects that can be attached to mouse clicks.

You can specify that an effect is shown when:

- The mouse button is pressed down
- The mouse button is released
- The mouse button is double
clicked

These 3 events exist for left, middle, and right mouse buttons.

To apply effects follow these steps:

- Ensure ‘Disable all’ is not checked
- Click the event you want to apply an effect to
- Click the ‘Change effect’ button and select an effect from the drop down list.
- Repeat for other events if required

Cursor Trails

Most cursor enhancements and Windows simply achieve this by displaying copies other the cursor, slightly transparent following the cursor. CursorXP can do much more.

There are 3 fundamental effect types.

- Cursor Ghost
- Particles
- Cursor follower

Cursor Ghost

The ghost is a series of increasingly transparent images of the cursor which follows the cursor movement.

There are 3 different parameters you can set:

Clones: This is the number of cursor images in the trail

Length:This is the length of the ghost trail

Initial opacity:This is how transparent the first ghost is. Ghosts then increase in opacity until the end of the trail

Particles

Particles display a chosen image scattered around the cursor in a specified pattern. You can choose a range of options:

Particles per second

Adjust this slider to specify how many new particles appear each second

Duration

Adjust the rate at which particles fade out here

Initial opacity

This is how transparent the particle is when it first appears before it starts to fade

Offset

By adjusting the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ sliders you can adjust the point relative to the cursor from which the particles start to appear

FPS (Frames per second)

Specify here how frequently you want the particle images to be refreshed. Reduce this number if you feel that the effect runs too slowly on your machine.

Movement

Specify the direction in which the particles move as they gradually fade away

Browse image

Chose the image which you wish to use as your particle from this list

Cursor Follower

A cursor follower is an effect that is attached to your cursor by way of a gravitational force. It’s much easier to look at it yourself rather than try to describe it J !

There are many parameters you can set:

Elements: This is the number of elements in the effect

Strength: This is the strength with which the elements are drawn to the cursor. As the cursor moves, gravity tries to pull the elements away from the cursor. A high strength resists this

Friction: Adjusting this affects how close to the cursor the elements remain. A low friction value means a long ‘chain’ of elements away from the cursor

Gravity: This is the strength with which the elements are pulled towards the bottom of the screen

Circle of Transparency: By adjusting this you can specify how transparency will be applied to the elements. A high ‘Cycle of Transparency’ means the elements close to the cursor will be highly transparent

Offset: By adjusting the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ sliders you can adjust the point relative to the cursor from which the particles start to appear

FPS (Frames per second): Specify here how frequently you want the particle images to be refreshed. Reduce this number if you feel that the effect runs too slowly on your machine.

Browse image: Chose the image which you wish to use as your particle from this list

Getting creative – An introduction

This section briefly describes what elements you can customize using CursorXP, and the graphics you need to do this.

There are 2 fundamental elements that you can customize for use in CursorXP. You can skin the cursors themselves, which can have multiple states and be animated. You can also provide graphics to be used for effects and trails.

Source Graphics

We will discuss how to actually create cursors, effects and trails in later chapters but first you need to understand the graphics formats you can use.

CursorXP can accept a variety of formats. It can accept .CUR, .ANI and .ICO formats that are traditionally used for cursors to provide backwards compatibility, but these formats don’t have the flexibility to show the features of CursorXP at its best.

Bitmaps (.BMP) files are one of the most commonly used and as such Cursor XP accepts them for graphics. One of the main limitations of BMP files is that they do not natively store any transparency information. As it is highly unlikely that you want all your cursors to be rectangular, CursorXP uses the technique of accepting ‘magic pink’ to provide a transparency option. The ‘magic pink’ technique is incredibly simple. All it means is that any time that Cursor XP encounters a shade of pure magenta (Red: 255, Green: 0, Blue: 255) in your BMP file it will treat that area as transparent.

For example, image 1 below would generate a cursor looking like image 2

Image 1: Source graphic

Image 2: Cursor

By far the most flexible format with which to create for CursorXP is the .PNG format because PNG files can contain transparency information, which allows the following advantages over the BMP format:

Varying degrees of transparency across the image

Anti-aliasing of edges for smoother graphics

Small file sizes

Most of the commonly used graphics applications can save files in PNG format.

Animations

Where animations are required, all you need to do is to place all the frames of the animation horizontally next to each other from left to right.

When you use this graphic within Cursor XP you will specify the number of images, so there is no need to do this at this time.

The image below is an example of an animation image. You can see how the spiral above the hand moves from frame to frame.

Creating themes – Making cursors

Creating your own theme is actually very simple once you have your graphics. You now know about the types of graphics you can use so this section shows you how to put them together into a theme.

You have two fundamental choices when creating a theme. You can either modify an existing theme or create a new one, by selecting <New Theme> from the bottom of the theme’s list.

Whichever option you choose, start by selecting a cursor and clicking the Configure’ button. When you have done this, you will see a new dialogue box.

The Interface

You will notice that several things have changed in the interface.

To start with, the cursor image now has a cross-hair which represents the point where the ‘click’ occurs. We will look at this later.

You also have a drop down list beneath the image. This is the list of different states in which the cursor can exist.

‘Use separated resize cursors’ is something I can quickly explain now. Normally, Windows displays exactly the same cursor if you resize a window horizontally from the right (East), or left (West). It also displays the same cursor when you resize vertically from the top (North) and the bottom (South). Checking this box allows you to create separate cursors for each direction. Regardless of which option you choose, the appropriate cursors will appear in cursor list.

The final button is a new ‘Configure’ bottom at the bottom of the screen which is what we will look at now.

Cursor Configuration

On clicking this button you will see this dialogue. There are two tabs which represent the two states in which the cursor can exist. It has a normal state, and then (optionally) a different appearance in it’s clicked state.

Let’s consider the Normal State.

A ‘Standard’ cursor uses the normal Windows cursor but still gives you the opportunity to utilise the rest of Cursor XP’s features. The ‘Enhanced’ option allows you to choose your own bitmap file by clicking the ‘Import’ button and configure it with the other options. This can be an image in any of the formats described earlier. Enhanced cursors let CursorXP exploit its full potential because by using i.e. PNG images and maybe even animation scripts you can make cursors that are really way cooler than the standard Windows cursors.

Graphics

Here you can Import an image to be used for the selected state of the selected cursor. This can be an image in any of the formats described earlier.

Frames

If you use an animated image then you need to specify the number of frames in the animation here.

Interval / Use script

In the case you are using an animation, you can configure the sequence of frames in two ways.

You can simply specify a the time period in milliseconds between the frames of the animation. In this case the animation will move through the image frames from left to right and then recommence at the left. If however, you check the ‘Alternate animation’ option, the animation will move from left to right and then back to the left frame by frame indefinitely.

You can assign a script that will describe the animation. In this case the image will contain all the frames needed and used in the animation, but the order in that frames are placed in the image will not necessarely define the sequence.
The actual sequence is described by the script. A script is made of 'tokens'. Each token describes one frame or an interval of frames and its timing. On running the animation, CursorXP will play tokens subsequentially from the first to the last, and then restart the script. Here are some examples of tokens:

5,100   Shows the frame 5 for 100 milliseconds.
10-20,50   Animates from frame 10 to frame 20. Each frame is visible for 50 milliseconds.
15-8,80   Animates from frame 15 to frame 8 (reversed). Each frame is visible for 80 milliseconds.

You can separate tokens with a carriage return or the ';' carachter.
The time period is optional if the token is not the first of the script. If you do not specify a time period, CursorXP will assign to that token the time of the previous token.
Here is an example of a full script:

5-10,60    Displays frames 5 to 10 with 60 milliseconds interval.
22,200;25;27    Displays frames 22, 25 and then 27 for 200 milliseconds.
4-1    Displays frames 4 to 1 with 200 milliseconds interval (the last defined time period, the one set for frame 22).
11-20,50    Displays frames from 11 to 20, 50 milliseconds each.
1     Displays frame 1 for 50 milliseconds.

Scripts can be very complex, but can be also used to make simple effects. I.e. say you have a smoothly rotating hourglass cursor, but you want it to stop for 1 second after each rotation. Without scripts you would need to add lots of identical frames at the end of your animation when the hourglass finished rotating (since you made a smooth animation, you must be using a low time period, thus need really lots of identical frames to have it stopping for just 1 seconds, this would of course waste memory for nothing). With a simple script you can avoid to make identical frames, thus using minimal memory and have the cursor more easily editable. If you have 30 frames, your script would be this:

1-29,50    Rotates the hourglass at 1000/50=20 frames per second
30,1000    Displays frame 30 and holds that for 1 second.

Hot spot

The ‘hot spot’ is the place where Windows registers a click who the user clicks the mouse. You need to specify ‘X’ (horizontal) and ‘Y’ (vertical) coordinates relative to the top left corner of your source graphic. If you have an animation, all frames will have the same hot spot position.

Clicked Cursor

Cursor XP allows you to specify a different image or animation to be displayed when the user clicks the mouse. To set this option you need to select the ‘Clicked’ tab. You will notice that this is the same as the ‘Normal’ tab apart from the first two options. Since standard Windows cursors don't support pressed states and this is a CursorXP only feature, you can only choose if using a different appearance for pressed state or not, but this will need to be a CursorXP cursor. So on the top of the dialog you find now the 'Use pressed state' check box.

That’s it – repeat this configuration for your other cursors and you’re finished!

Creating themes – Adding effects

Special effects are very simple to create. This section shops you how to create the image and how to make it accessible to CursorXP

Once you understand the concept of animated source graphics you can very quickly create an effect.

The image

To create an effect you simply need to create an image that represents the effect. It is most likely that this will be an animated effect as static effects are not likely to be very interesting. You will therefore have an image containing several frames of the animation going from left to right like the example below.

The grid shows you that there are 8 frames to my animation, and because I have used the PNG format I have been able to use varying degrees of transparency.

Once you have this, making it available to Cursor XP is simple, but the secret is in the name of your file.

Making the effect available

The way you name your file is crucial to giving CursorXP the information it needs to animate the image. This is useful because it removes the need for an extra dialogue or information file of some sort.

My demonstration effect is named as follows: demoeffect -frm=8 -spd=60.png

This can be broken down into 3 sections separated by spaces:

Demoeffect    This is the name of your effect as it is to be displayed in the list

-frm=8    This is the number of frames in the animation (in this case 8)

-spd=60    This parameter specified the interval between frames in milliseconds (in this case 60ms)

This file should then be placed in the /FX sub-directory of where you installed Cursor XP.

Once you have done this it will appear in your list of available effects.

Creating themes – Adding trails

Even more simple than effects this chapter shows you how to create cursor trails.

Trails are animated by their nature, and as such, all you need is a single static image in order to create a trail.

The Image

All you need to do is create a single image using one of the formats mentioned earlier. For mine I’ve just used a shrunken Stardock logo and made the background transparent.

Making the Trail available

Simply save your file in the /Trail sub-directory of where you installed Cursor XP. It will now be available for selection.

Additional resources

Examine this section if you want to find other sources of information regarding Cursor XP and Cursor XP skins.

This guide should tell you almost everything you need to know to use Cursor XP and create your own skins. There are however, other resources online which will assist you.

Getting Cursor XP skins

Your primary source of Cursor XP skins should be WinCustomize.

Library of Cursor XP skins

Additional tools

AniUtil is a simple utility for skinners to make "animated" PNG or BMP images that are required as source images for Cursor XP skins.

Download AniUtil