Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't I get the cursor to reliably appear in movies?

Last Updated Apr 12, 2007

There is a call in Mac OS X that is supposed to return the cursor's visibility state. It does not work reliably when an application in the background is querying the OS for the cursor visibility state. This bug has been logged with Apple, and is scheduled to be fixed in a major update to Mac OS X (can't say more than that, sorry) sometime down the road.

The only way we could reliably make the cursor visible or invisible was based on the state of the checkbox in Snapz Pro X, not what was actually going on (because of the OS's erroneous reporting of the cursor state). This made creating movies in major programs such as Photoshop impossible, because the cursor was either always visible (and thus stamped over the various Photoshop cursors such as brushes), or always invisible (and thus obviously unusable for Photoshop videos).

So what we did is this - if the Cursor Visible checkbox is checked, the cursor is always visible. Period. If the Cursor Visible checkbox is unchecked, we rely on the Mac OS to tell us whether it should be visible or not, which works a lot of the time, but also fails a lot of the time.

This is supposed to be addressed in a System update.