[samrod]

It's kinda sad that the OS X cursor pixelates when enlarged in the Universal Access pref. I hope that by Snow Leopard, Apple's efforts in resolution-independent scaling smooth out these rough edges in the 8 year old OS.
The image used for the cursor should be either 4x or 8x larger than default, so that the default size not only scales up smoothly, but is displayed at either quarter or eighth size, avoiding anti-aliasing.
samrod

[clinton1550]

Move the cursor to where ever you have the Dock, if you have the Dock hidden or if you have magnification on, you can quickly work out where it is.

[mdawson]

Hence one of the major perks of a graphics tablet. I always use absolute positioning so my cursor is always exactly where I place the pen. On the other hand, at work dual displays is standard for the analysts, developers and simulation modelers. Even with the relatively small displays I have at my desk, it is easy to lose the cursor.

Of course a major part of the problem is that 6 months of working on dual displays is not going to alter habits built up over nearly 30 years of using computers with a single display. On those occasions where I lose the cursor, it is because my focus is the primary display on the left and not the second display on the right where the cursor may happen to have been left when I was interrupted or left my desk. (The fact that my second display is a CRT with a less sharp image does not help either.)

[IEBA1]

My favorite was the mouse locator in Connectix PowerBook Utilities... a tiny suite of essential tidbits. I think the key sequence was command-space bar (which is now Spotlight) but all it did was toggle the OS' ZoomRect function (that was part of opening or closing any item in the finder) that closed a rectangle to the cursor, wherever it may be. The real magic is that it zoomed from the full screen, so no matter where you were looking, you were guided to where the mouse was.
Like OS-9, I miss CPU, as it was called.

[whitedog]

I am visually impaired so losing the cursor is a big problem for me. I've used Mousepose for years now. It dims the screen, leaving a circle of light around the cursor. You can adjust the level of screen dimming as well as the size of the highlight circle. I really miss it when I'm working on someone else's computer and have to roll up to a corner of the screen to find the cursor. Mousepose is not free, but has paid for itself many times over, taking into account saved time and aggravation. The most common way I find to lose the cursor is when I move over a text document and it changes to an i-beam, which can easily get lost on a busy page of text. I have the keyboard shortcut for Mousepose assigned to one of the buttons of my Kensington Turbo Mouse, which is easier to use, for me, than an F-key; when I'm looking for the cursor, my hand is usually already on the mouse.

I agree something like this should be built into the OS; it's a core usability issue. By the way, I also have the cursor enlarged via Universal Access, but often this isn't enough, especially for the i-beam cursor. As for zooming the screen, this is far too distracting and means you have to zoom out again, which requires additional key strokes; and it's quite possible to lose the cursor all over again when you zoom out. That's my experience, anyway.

[EdgeCase]

mdawson, on 09 April 2009 - 05:25 AM, said:

On those occasions where I lose the cursor, it is because my focus is the primary display on the left and not the second display on the right where the cursor may happen to have been left when I was interrupted or left my desk.

My app EdgeCase [Mac App Store] is built to solve exactly this problem. It restricts your cursor to one monitor at a time; puts up hard non-crossing edges between your displays.

http://i.imgur.com/5zrGj.png

When you do want to manually switch between displays, you can do so with one of the included crossing shortcuts. Bounce the cursor on the edge, wait for 1/2 second, hold a hotkey, etc.

Give it a try, might be what you're looking for.

EdgeCase [Mac App Store]

[bastion]

EdgeCase, on 26 July 2012 - 12:35 AM, said:

mdawson, on 09 April 2009 - 05:25 AM, said:

On those occasions where I lose the cursor, it is because my focus is the primary display on the left and not the second display on the right where the cursor may happen to have been left when I was interrupted or left my desk.

My app EdgeCase [Mac App Store] is built to solve exactly this problem. It restricts your cursor to one monitor at a time; puts up hard non-crossing edges between your displays.

When you do want to manually switch between displays, you can do so with one of the included crossing shortcuts. Bounce the cursor on the edge, wait for 1/2 second, hold a hotkey, etc.

Give it a try, might be what you're looking for.

a. Advertising is against the TOS of these forums.
b. Your product, while kind of cool, doesn't really address the situation the prior poster described as I understand it. The poster has intentionally moved the mouse cursor to a different display, gone off-task for a while, and then forgotten that it was there.

Something that might work for the prior poster - and you might consider adding - is an option to move the mouse cursor back to the main screen after some configurable amount of idle time. I'm not sure how many people would find that appealing, but it's a simple bit of code and as long as it is subject to user configuration few people would actually complain.

Out of curiosity, does the program only work when leaving the main screen, or at any action that would cross a device margin? Sort of a semi-permeable membrane, as it were.