Spruce up your next MOSS demonstration with a customized MOSS (mouse) cursor! That's right, get your free, customized MOSS cursors here. I've created two MOSS cursors, included in the attached ZIP at the end of this post.
The blue one, custom.cur shown below, I added to the body tag of my CSS file so this cursor activates by default on a page.
The transparent one, custom3.cur shown below, I added to both the a:link and a:visited tags of my CSS file. So this cursor activates when you move it over links on a page.
To use the cursors, download the customMOSScursors.zip file (URL at the end of this post), unzip and save the .cur files in to a folder within your site, for example, an images folder within a site or the _layouts/images directory in the 12 Hive. Then simply reference each cursor file within the respective site CSS file. For example, I added the below code to a CEWP (hidden) on the home page of one of my sites, so that both cursors are only active on the home page of the site.
<style type="text/css">
body { cursor: url("images/custom.cur"); }
a:link { cursor: url("images/custom3.cur")}
a:visited { cursor: url("images/custom3.cur"); }
</style>
But if you wanted to *really* impress your audience and have a customized cursor appear all throughout your site/s then you could add it to a custom CSS file on your Web front-end server, and add the reference to the body tag.
I created both cursors in Visual Studio 2005, as shown below. I've not yet tried creating cursors in other applications, but Visual Studio includes a range of cursor types - 16x16 through to 96x96, colors and monochrome - and some tools for creating shapes, including ellipses, and cursor hotspots. You can also edit existing .cur files.
But, remember, I've done this post and provided samples for demonstration purposes. If you are considering adding custom cursors to your Web application, SharePoint or other, consider the usability aspects of doing so (like the design and application of the custom cursor/s, business justification, etc) and remember too that not all browsers support custom cursor files. I've successfully tested both cursors in IE6 and IE7, but they failed to show in Firefox 2.0.0.1 (the current version in my dev environment); Firefox simply reverted back to the default pointer/cursor.
The cursor files in the referenced ZIP are 32x32, 16 color. The ZIP also includes a WMV of the cursors in action.
http://mindsharpblogs.com/Files/Cursors/customMOSScursors.zip.
For further information about cursors, specifically Windows cursors, see my colleague's recent posts on Windows cursors:- http://citrixblogger.org/2008/02/08/cursor-blinking/ and http://citrixblogger.org/2008/02/07/cursor-shadowing-turn-it-off/.