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Introduction

The standard Windows mouse cursor technology has not changed since 1994. That was the release of Windows NT 3.1. A lot has happened to computer technology since 1994 to improve the entire Windows experience. To improve mouse cursors on Windows, a new program called SkinStudio 6 has been developed.

SkinStudio 6 is a program that allows users to change their standard Windows mouse cursors to fully animated, alpha-blended mouse cursors that just look great. Fluid animation, alpha blended smoothness and special effects that look good and improve the ease of use of Windows (such as resizing mouse cursors on the fly, adding button click events, etc.).

SkinStudio 6 features

SkinStudio 6 comes with an easy to use interface. Simply choose the cursor you want and hit apply.

At any time, you can revert to the standard mouse cursor by hitting ctrl-shift-c.

Effects

SkinStudio 6 can assign a multitude of effects for mouse events that can provide useful feedback and some visual flavor to your PC.

Settings

Users have a great deal of control over how the mouse cursor is displayed. The color, opacity and size can easily be adjusted on the fly. Even the shadows can be modified including dynamic shadows that allow users to set light sourcing onto cursors.

Movement smoothness

One of the coolest features of SkinStudio 6 is movement smoothness. Movement smoothness takes advantage of modern hardware to give cursors an adjustable amount of inertia. It's a feature found commonly in PC games that makes precise mouse control easier. Some might argue that if SkinStudio 6 did nothing visual but simply did this that it would be worth using just for this feature alone.

Advanced features

SkinStudio 6 allows users to edit their mouse cursors right from within the program.

Create your own SkinStudio 6 themes by importing .PNG files as your cursors. Animated cursors are simply .PNG files with frames of animation (use the editor to tell SkinStudio 6 how many frames are in your .PNG file)

SkinStudio 6 vs. CursorXP

SkinStudio 6's predecessor, CursorXP was designed specifically for Windows XP and has been a very popular program. SkinStudio 6 has been designed to support both Windows XP and Windows Vista and should work fine on future versions of Microsoft Windows.

SkinStudio 6 has a few key features over CursorXP:

Supports Windows Vista as well as Windows XP
Movement Smoothness
A full-blown theme editor
SkinStudio 6 themes can integrate effects right into the theme (a much more integrated experience).
New, easy to use configuration manager
Dynamic shadows with custom lighting effects