Plaidophile

Fluffy

I guess you can't mess with perfection.

Except by adding an alpha channel.

Huh? There's no alpha channel on the system pointer, at least not on any of the OSX systems I've ever worked on.

The arrow cursor actually goes all the way back to the earliest GUIs at PARC!

I couldn't find any clear pictures of the Smalltalk-72 screen, but here's one that's kind of blurry but still shows the pointer:


You can see more in the seminal article Personal Dynamic Media:
http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

I can't vouch for this being pixel-for-pixel the same, because I never used ST-72. I do know from experience that the Smalltalk-80 cursor was identical, except that it didn't have a white border because the Xerox machines could only use OR to overlay the cursor bits (which also meant that it disappeared over a black background.)

fluffy

Huh? There's no alpha channel on the system pointer, at least not on any of the OSX systems I've ever worked on.

Open up X11 and mouse over an xterm to get it to change the cursor to its own internal arrow. Then watch the cursor carefully as you click on an Aqua program (try the Desktop, with a dark background) to return the cursor to normal.

I don't really have any way to take a screenshot, but the cursor gets a little bit pointier. I don't know if there's an alpha channel involved or not, but I'm pretty sure the pointer image is now grayscale.

I think you be trippin'. I've used the screen magnifier to zoom in on it and I don't see any evidence of any alpha blending or antialiasing or whatever.

Also, many apps, including Safari, show the internal arrow most of the time. In the case of Safari it's whenever it's not over a text field or link.

Though it might be a hardware-dependent thing, since I've only run OSX on two systems with a Rage 128 and one with a geForce 5200FX Mobile. In which case, nVidia shows that they have impeccable taste, which ATI may or may not have lost.

Here we go...



One of those is from the 1984 screenshots. The other one is the OSX system cursor. Can you tell which is which?

The effect appears to be disabled on machines with older GPUs, as well as when screen magnification is turned on.

There's definitely a difference between the X11 cursor and the standard cursor - three white pixels' worth, to be exact. One on each of the far corners of the arrow, and one on the end of the tail.

I could've sworn I had noticed some shadowing on the cursor in 10.2. I can't get it to show up now, though. Maybe it doesn't show up on external displays for some reason. I really don't know.

I wouldn't consider the FX5200 to be an older GPU, and the effect isn't disabled when magnification is turned on - the spinnyball still has a drop shadow. (Also the spinnyball always has a drop shadow even on the Rage 128.)

Also, the X11 cursor is NOT the Apple cursor. I'm only talking about the Apple cursor being unchanged. The X11 cursor is also unchanged since X11R1, but it's a different kind of unchanged. It's also uglier.

But finding the difference between the X11 cursor and the Apple cursor is not what I was talking about - it was how the Apple cursor has been unchanged since Mac OS 1.0.

Also, on the subway home today I realized something really cool: Apple is probably the only company to have their corporate logo as part of the standard Unicode character set (F8FF). How cool is that?

(Damnit, nevermind, that's just the "reserved for private use" area.)

Okay, weird, now my pointer has an exterior shadow. I swear it didn't when I made that post. I guess it's just so subtle that I don't notice its presence or absence. Which is as it should be! (Unlike that dreadful one in Win2K/XP which makes it look like your cursor is floating like an inch off the screen.)

Even stranger... I recently reinstalled OS X (screwed up system something-or-another), and the cursor showed up with a shadow while I was doing the installation. It stuck around for a while, but is gone again now.

I think it might have something to do with using an external monitor, but I can't be sure.

*sob* come back, my little cursor shadow!

Well, now that I've been reminded that there normally is a shadow, I'm pretty sure that even on the Rage 128 on my old G4/450 it had one. Or at least on the Radeon I later upgraded it to. But obviously, memories are very malleable.

Oh, and incidentally, it does still have the shadow when the screen is magnified, and it turns out that when there's a shadow, the cursor itself is also anti-aliased. So they DID mess with perfection. :/