A cursor worth watching.

Lean, press, ripple

The pointer leans into sideways motion. The rotation is proportional to horizontal speed measured in content widths per second, soft-capped with a hyperbolic tangent at 15°, and it pivots on the hot spot so the tip leads and the body swings behind it. Camera motion is excluded, so panning the virtual camera does not tilt the cursor.

A click presses the pointer down towards its tip: eased in over 70 ms, held at 76 % for at least 90 ms so a fast click still reads, and sprung back 160 ms after the recorded mouse-up. A drag therefore stays pressed for its whole length. The ripple is a separate choice: a wave that leaves the pointer's edge and travels about 21.5 points over half a second, thinning from a solid dot to a hairline and fading on a curve so it dies away rather than switching off. A pale core over a wider dark halo keeps it legible on light and dark interfaces alike.

Four pointers, three click effects

What is drawn and how a click is marked are independent choices, so any of the four pairs with any of the three.

• As recorded draws the captured cursor of the moment, so the pointer changes shape with the app exactly as it did on screen.
• Arrow pins the plain macOS pointer throughout, which is a different thing: it ignores an app's own idea of a pointer.
• Touch draws a fingertip, a translucent disc with a white rim, for demos that will be shown as a mobile flow.
• Hidden draws nothing, leaving a clean picture that a ripple can still mark.

Click effects are ring, scale, or none. The ring needs only click data, so it marks clicks even under a hidden pointer; the press needs a pointer to press.

Sharp at 250 % and under a zoom

AppKit hands most cursors over as 1× and 2× bitmaps, which is why a pointing hand goes visibly soft at demo sizes. macOS keeps the vector artwork for every cursor on disk, so Lumae recognises a captured cursor by its size, hot spot and pixels, then rasterises the matching artwork at 12 pixels per point with the shadow macOS draws under it. A cursor it cannot match is enlarged with Lanczos rather than bilinear, which left a 2× system bitmap visibly soft.

The recording stays self-contained: the artwork is resolved while recording and stored in the project, so the renderer never reads system files.

Questions