OmniDazzle -- Add visual highlights to mouse movement
Jun 22, '06 07:30:05AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]
Having a large screen, and often walking away from my machine, I admit to having a soft spot for utilities that help find the mouse cursor when I return to my machine. That's why both Mouseposé and Mouse Locator have been prior Picks of the Week. This week's entry is the third such utility that I've chosen as a Pick...but to say OmniDazzle is just a mouse location utility is shortchanging everything this little application can do.
OmniDazzler features eleven different "effects" you can apply to your mouse. These vary from a simple bullseye cursor to comic style "bammo!" splashes to highlighting the active window to drawing a highlight shape around something on your screen to the visually engaging pixie dust mouse trails. The interface for selecting these effects is an innovative little browser window with panes for each effect, as seen at right. As you click each pane, that interface comes forward, showing a small demo of the effect, as well as its available settings. Since it's hard to describe, I recorded a brief movie (333x285 [276KB] or 666x569 [696KB]) showing it in action.
One downside of this interface is that it will suck up some CPU power -- about 25% on my Dual G5, and 40% to 50% of my MacBook, depending on which effect is on screen. But once you've chosen an effect and closed the window, OmniDazzle takes no appreciable CPU until activated. Even then, CPU usage is much less than when browsing the effects interface. Using Pixie Trails, for instance (which is so interesting you'll find yourself moving the mouse just to watch it), I saw about 12% CPU usage on the G5, and 30% on the MacBook.
Each effect can be activated by either a keystroke, a press of a mouse button, or by simply moving your mouse back and forth a few times ("shake"). Many effects have multiple configuration options to help you get just the effect you're looking for. Once active, the effect will stay active until you toggle it off again.
OmniDazzle won't replace Mouse Locator for the simple task of locating my mouse when I return to my desk, simply because it lacks an "activate after X minutes of no motion" setting. But for giving presentations, or highlighting things in video recordings, it will be a welcome addition to my toolkit. And thinking forward to April 1st, installing it on someone's Mac and setting the pixie trails activation to a mouse click will bring some interesting results :).
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